The UK Government have announced their new National Cyber Strategy 2022 to ensure that the country remains confident, capable, and resilient in the digital world and that we continue to adapt and innovate in the realm of cyberspace.  As part of this vision, maintaining a Technology Advantage is key to exploit the opportunities and withstand the challenges of the digital age.

UK Research and Innovation’s Digital Security by Design (DSbD) will help to strengthen the UK’s position as a world leader in secure platform design and are funding four projects to demonstrate the impact of new technologies that could radically change the foundation of computing infrastructure by creating a new combined hardware and software ecosystem – which will underpin future digital products and services.

Very rarely is there an opportunity to change something as fundamental as the changes this project could deliver. Today’s computers can be traced back to designs developed decades ago with major issues with the respect to the protection of data and we have been working with solutions designed without security in mind. Capability Enhanced Hardware developed by Arm (codename Morello) and The University of Cambridge (CHERI architecture) will provide the foundation for development of industry applications to protect us from a range of existing and future security vulnerabilities by enabling 128-bit ‘capabilities’ with granular software compartmentalisation and memory protection that cannot operate outside predefined bounds and are separated from regular data.

CyberHive were one of the four projects selected for funding and in collaboration with The University of Oxford will develop a demonstrator and supporting framework of development tools to help digital computing infrastructure to become more resistant to attacks. They will also develop innovative new methods to secure the data being transmitted by applying layered encryption resistant to attack by quantum computers that is thus more resilient to near-term and future cyber-threats – making it harder to infiltrate network infrastructure or endpoints and remotely take control or extract sensitive information. This technology could be equally used to protect organisations’ remote workforce as a secure gateway device or be retro-fitted to devices such as connected autonomous vehicles (CAV), critical public infrastructure, or industrial internet-of-things (IIoT) endpoints.

David Blundell, Founder and CTO of CyberHive said:

“We are extremely proud to have our technology potential recognised and to be part of UK Research and Innovation’s DSbD ecosystem supported by DCMS and Arm, playing a key collaborative role in creating a resilient, innovative platform and novel capabilities for a secure future, further enhancing the cyber protection of UK businesses and critical infrastructure.

Working closely with our consortium partners to develop real-world applications across business and industry verticals we will harness the hardware cyber-resilience capabilities of the Arm Morello demonstrator in conjunction with of our own novel post-quantum connectivity technology to further enhance the security of internet connected devices.”

Continuing their successful partnership with The University of Oxford, from which CyberHive’s first patented technology, Trusted Cloud is now taught as part of the MSc in Software and Systems Security this project will also focus on the application area of Prof. David Wallom’s research in smart energy systems, edge & cloud computing, and transport systems. The work here will be presented as part of the module on Energy Systems Digitization for the University of Oxford MSc in Energy Systems, a new course that is already leading in its area.

Beyond the research and platform prototyping, the team have also received the backing from several partner organisations who will provide their domain expertise throughout the project and serve as end-user applications for in-field testing and future commercialisation.

For more information on the project, visit https://www.dsbd.tech/