PA Consulting and DSIT launch CHERI Adoption Collective to strengthen cyber resilience across UK critical infrastructure
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PA Consulting, the global innovation and transformation consultancy, and the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) today launch the CHERI Adoption Collective - bringing together original equipment manufacturers (OEM), asset owners and semiconductor suppliers to accelerate the deployment of hardware‑enforced memory safety across the UK’s critical digital systems.
CHERI is a new type of microchip technology which improves cyber security at the hardware level. Memory safety flaws account for 70 per cent of software security defaults worldwide and underpin many severe cyber incidents. To address this, the Collective will bring together leading organisations from the energy, defence, telecoms, and semiconductor sectors to create a more resilient, lower cost, and secure-by‑design foundation for both legacy and next‑generation systems with minimal software change.
Participants include BT, National Grid, SSE, EA Technology, Ultra, Hildebrand, and Goldilock - alongside supply chain partners Codasip, EnSilica and SCI Semiconductors.
Addressing the UK’s £27bn cyber resilience problem
As the UK modernises its energy system, telecoms infrastructure, and defence platforms, organisations increasingly rely on complex digital systems built on extensive legacy codebases. Traditional security approaches like patching, rewrites, or shifting to safer languages struggle to meet this challenge.
The Collective will work with organisations to accelerate the deployment of technologies which can protect the UK’s critical infrastructure, strengthen their business cases, and shape assurance frameworks, procurement specifications, supply chain capability, and integration models.
The CHERI Adoption Collective is helping us to shape the next generation of secure infrastructure and ensure we are ready to deploy technologies that strengthen resilience and reduce lifecycle risk. This has never been more important, as AI-enabled and highly connected systems increase the consequences of software compromise and make strong, hardware‑level protection more critical than ever. By bringing together the organisations best placed to accelerate hardware-enforced memory safety at scale and aligning government and industry around a clear route to deployment, we can improve resilience across critical infrastructure and unlock significant economic opportunity.”
Cyber-attacks aren’t abstract threats - they delay NHS appointments, disrupt essential services, and put people’s most sensitive data at risk. Memory safety bugs are one of the most common routes hackers use to break into systems, so it's critical that we work together right across the economy to tackle them. 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.”
PA brings deep expertise across cyber security, systems engineering, semiconductor strategy and large-scale technology transformation. It combines technical innovation with end‑to‑end delivery capability, from early‑stage R&D to product design, assurance, commercialisation, and deployment - helping organisations bring breakthrough technologies like CHERI into real‑world use.
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