Tian Hui, the founder of High-Dimension Data Company in Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone, Anhui province, advocates “behavioral security” of information system security. 

He is also the team leader of Jianghuai Silicon Valley in the Yangtse-Huaihe River area, an expert on the list of “Luzhou Talents” and a member of the multimedia security committee for China Society of Image and Graphics.

Tian studied electronic information engineering in University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2000. Then he started his own business on May 4, 2014, founding the first new-type information security company with information hiding technology industrialization in China. 

Tian Hui, advocator of information behavioral security. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

His company has undertaken programs for national organs such as National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets, and was invited to many state-level exhibitions, such as the national security technology achievements exhibition, the third civil-military integration high-tech exhibition, and counter-terrorism equipment exhibition of China’s Ministry of Public Security. He was  met Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission. 

Traditional data security relies on encryption technology and users store or share data by encrypting it into ciphertext.

In the era of big data, cipher communication protects the content of communication, but exposes the behaviors of users, and the behaviors have become the focus of big data analysis. Is there any technology that could realize both the content and behavioral security?

The company’s information hiding technology could realize behavioral security, which is a complement to content security realized by encryption technology. The information hiding technology helps its users hide private data in ordinary multimedia files, and it allows users to share important data by sharing the files with private data. This could help achieve higher level of security because sharing ordinary multimedia files is considered a normal behavior that is hard to be noticed. 

In the spring of 2014, Tian resigned and started up the business, convincing his family to use their years of savings for the business. Before resigning he was a senior executive of a renowned listed company in his industry, with nearly one million in annual salary. The Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone highly supports innovation and entrepreneurship, and therefore Tian set up his company in the park without any second thought.

His company has developed a series of popular products, based on its top-ranking information hiding technology. For example, the first domestic safe USB flash disc made it to vogue as soon as the product made it into the market. An APP product for instant safe communication has become quite popular for private sharing between friends, which is a great tool for protecting information.

The company also develops products for particular industries, including the military, public security organs and secrecy industry. Their products for steganography detection and forensics, as well as screen capture and tracing could help users effectively trace terrorist organizations’ internal communication through the Internet. The National Administration for the Protection of State Secrets, the military and the government of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region pay high attention to their products. 

What makes Tian feel difficult is the balancing of his time between work and his family. He and his family underestimated the energy, time, and capital investment for entrepreneurship, especially when spending too little time with his children.

Tian hopes to work hard to make the products better, solve practical problems through innovation and bring safety to their users in the future. He hopes that when information hiding technology and products is mentioned, people right away think of his product.