The Digital Security by Design (DSbD) Programme has funded a range of research projects working to enrich and expand the DSbD software ecosystem before the availability of commercial hardware on the market.

These projects will leverage the DSbD Technology Hardware Prototype, also known as the Morello Board, to work on a focused area within a selected and specified software stack, Operating System (OS) or a developer toolchain used by a digital system. This research focuses on enriching the evolving Morello Stacks and expanding the overall support, toolchains and components that will help block the exploitation of up to 70% of ongoing memory safety vulnerabilities.

Academic research at the heart

This research evaluates the performance impact of using DSbD technologies based on specified performance requirements and objectives while taking into account the expected maturity of the specified software stack or OS or developer toolchain.

This invaluable research helps to validate the technology and realises the benefits of DSbD technologies for software development within developer frameworks or middleware. This also addresses OS and developer toolchains, for example, compilers, linkers, debuggers and verifiers.

UK academic consortiums are undertaking projects focusing on:

• language runtimes
• shared libraries
• dependent packages
• other platform services across Linux-based

Projects will also focus on other open-source operating systems that will help address the market failure in hardware security and provide a capability model for enhancing memory safety.

Making sense of an uncharted future

The prospect of DSbD presents a unique set of challenges because the full potential of the programme DSbD – including issues such as use cases, socio-technical impacts, and the regulatory frameworks that are likely to accompany its adoption – are all situated in a volatile, uncertain and unknown future.

Hence, the Discribe Hub Futures project was commissioned to better understand the specialist kind of future thinking that is required to take on and tackle these challenges. This helps to resist the assumption that present and historic trends are inevitable and will continue and helps avoid “business-as-usual” thinking”.

“Digital Security by Design allows us to rebuild the foundations of our digital economy which will make it secure by design and the potential of this for our society to live in a trusted safe environment.”

– Adam Joinson, Professor of Management Information, Decisions & Operations at Bath University