The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) Digital Security by Design challenge is executing a mission to increase the protection of software in the light of increased cyber-attack against various class of software vulnerabilities, through additional hardware protection capabilities architected around the containment of pointers, and the privilege by which regions of fine grain data can be accessed.

Leveraging the Capability Hardware concepts and approaches investigated by the CHERI program (led by the University of Cambridge), a consortium led by Arm is investigating a prototype silicon-based solution based on Arm AArch64 architecture. This prototype solution will be made openly available to academics and businesses across the UK, so as to provide early access, evaluation, and the opportunity to feed back on the proposed major change to the instruction set architecture of a processor, while investigating the broader impact to various aspects of computer science and ICT in general.

EPSRC, on behalf of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF), would like to commit up to £8 million (at 80% FEC) to support academic research projects from across the broader research landscape that address specific objectives within the scope of the Digital Security by Design challenge. The aim is to support innovative research projects that will help to move the technology beyond the state of the art, moving Capability Hardware concepts and use forward, without duplicating or conflicting with the existing CHERI research.

Applications for full proposals are sought from project teams based at Research Organisations in the UK who are eligible to receive EPSRC funding. Equipment over £10,000 in value (incl. VAT) will not be available through this call.

Ahead of the closing date, join our workshop on 22 November 2019 in London to facilitate academia-industry and academia-academia collaboration.