Unlocking a new era of cyber resilience and growth…

The UK’s critical infrastructure is undergoing a profound shift. Energy networks, telecoms systems, transport platforms and defence capabilities are becoming more digital, more connected, and increasingly AI enabled. This shift sharpens the consequences when things go wrong, but it also brings enormous opportunity for greater resilience, safety, and economic growth.

Addressing an urgency of trust in our digital systems

Much of the infrastructure we rely on every day was not designed for today’s threat landscape. Systems built decades ago now depend on complex digital environments, often running on vast legacy codebases. While connectivity and automation have improved performance and efficiency, they have also created new, systemic vulnerabilities that are difficult and costly to manage through software alone.

All industries face increased pressure to deliver more secure, reliable and efficient systems whilst adapting to:

Growing consumer demand for trust and service continuity
Increasing regulatory scrutiny and liability
Expanding attack surfaces from increased digitalisation
Rising cyber threats to operational technology.

The technology to build more secure systems already exists, so the challenge isn’t about lack of innovation. The real constraint has been adoption.

When everyone owns the risk, but no one owns the responsibility

Semiconductors sit at the heart of modern infrastructure. They are embedded everywhere – from energy substations and telecoms exchanges to defence platforms and emerging autonomous technologies. Yet security has historically been addressed in software rather than designed into the hardware itself, leaving systems vulnerable.

The problem is structural. Asset owners, equipment manufacturers, chip suppliers, regulators and policymakers all sit at different points in the value chain with each making rational decisions in isolation. Without coordinated demand, there has been little incentive to adopt more secure hardware architectures, despite the long term resilience benefits.

The result is a familiar cycle: proven security innovations struggle to scale, not because they don’t work, but because no single organisation can shift the market on its own.

From technology breakthrough to system level change

CHERI – a processor architecture that embeds memory safety and fine grained isolation directly into hardware – changes what is technically possible. By placing security guard rails inside the chip itself, it prevents entire classes of cyber vulnerabilities from emerging in the first place, even in legacy or unpatched systems.

CHERI’s real significance, however, isn’t the chip. It is what happens when an ecosystem aligns around it.

Recognising that technology alone won’t drive change at the pace required, we are working with the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) to help create the CHERI Adoption Collective – a first of its kind national initiative designed to overcome inertia and accelerate secure by design infrastructure across the UK.

CHERI is fundamental to reducing these risks, and the UK has been a leader in this important work, from the very start. The CHERI Adoption Collective will keep us at the forefront as those efforts continue – building a safer and more resilient economy for everyone.”

Baroness Lloyd of Effra CBE Minister for Digital Economy, UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

Building a collective to unlock adoption

The Collective brings together all the parties needed to turn innovation into reality: owners and operators of critical national infrastructure, original equipment manufacturers, semiconductor suppliers, regulators, standards bodies, and Government.

By convening these organisations around a shared challenge, the Collective tackles the demand and supply imbalance that has held adoption back. Infrastructure owners can signal intent and future demand. Government can provide policy direction and early market commitments. Suppliers can invest with confidence, knowing there is a viable route to scale.

The impact is tangible. The programme has already identified multiple real world use cases moving towards implementation, alongside a broader pipeline that demonstrates how hardware level security can become the norm rather than the exception.

This isn’t a one off intervention. Like our work with CRENIC, the CHERI Adoption Collective is designed as a long term capability, creating the conditions for sustained collaboration, continuous learning, and lasting system change.

Safer infrastructure and stronger UK growth

The ambition goes beyond cyber security. By aligning public and private investment behind secure hardware innovation, the Collective also supports economic growth.

Strengthening the UK’s semiconductor and deep tech ecosystem helps keep high value capability onshore, supports emerging suppliers, and builds exportable expertise in secure by design systems. In this way, investment in national resilience also becomes investment in long term competitiveness – a multiplier effect that benefits both society and the economy.

A new model for securing what matters most

As digital systems become ever more embedded in daily life, national resilience can no longer rely on piecemeal fixes or reactive defences. It requires a shift in how security is designed, adopted, and governed across entire ecosystems.

The CHERI Adoption Collective shows what is possible when industry and government move together aligning incentives and responsibility, and shaping markets together around long term outcomes.

The lesson for leaders is clear. The technologies that define our future infrastructures are already here. The opportunity now is to adopt them collectively, at pace and at scale, to keep the systems we depend on secure, trusted, and fit for the decades ahead.