Funding available to improve UK cyber-security

The UK government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) is to spend up to £8m on projects that improve UK cyber security, in grants from £200,000 to £1.4m, which will be allocated after a competition ending on 08 December.

Part of the Government’s ‘Digital security by design challenge’ (DSbD challenge), the aim of the ‘Software ecosystem development competition’ is to fund “a range of projects that work to enrich and expand the DSbD software ecosystem prior to the availability of commercial hardware”, according to government body UK Research and Innovation. “Projects will leverage the DSbD technology hardware prototype, also known as Morello Board, to work on a focused area within a selected and specified software stack, or operating system, or developer toolchain used by a digital system.”

Morello Board has come out of an Arm-led research program called Morello whose aim is to “radically update the security foundations of the digital computing infrastructure that underpins the entire economy”, according to Arm. The University of Cambridge is also involved.

The Board has a prototype security-enhanced SoC, and is intended to enable industry and academia to test its architecture in real-world use-cases.

Specifically, according to UKRI, projects must focus on either:

enriching the evolving Morello stacks
expanding overall support and making available additional DSbD enabled software stacks, tool-chains and components

“The competition aims to expand the DSbD software ecosystem by funding projects across industry and academia that will support engineers and developers with the required components to transition into the technology and new way of implementing security by design in future products and services,” said UKRI.

Innovate UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), both part of UKRI, are involved in the competition, which can be found here.

Cybersecurity workshops

On top of this, UKRI has announced a programme to increase understanding of DSbD technologies. It “will provide UK technology businesses with training and opportunities to block cyber vulnerabilities using the Digital DSbD technologies prototyped in the Arm Morello board”.

The programme will be delivered by the Digital Catapult as a series of events and workshops, with the programme launching in January. Keep an eye on the Digital Catapult’s events webpage here closer to January – or sign up for updates

Other websites:

UK government DSbD

Software ecosystem development competition