SCI Semiconductors, a Cambridge-based tech company working on Capability Hardware Enhanced Risc Instructions (Cheri) systems to manage cyber defences, is to receive funding from the UK government’s Defence Technology Exploitation Programme (DTEP) to continue its work on embedding the emergent technology into military systems.
Cheri, which has been in development for some time, is capable of defending against memory-related vulnerabilities which are a factor in the majority of cyber attacks, perhaps as many as 70%.
It works to address a lack of memory safety in implementations of programming languages by compartmentalising each piece of data or system resource with its own access rules.
Effectively, this stops programs from doing things they should not, and makes it harder for a threat actor to trick a program into doing something it should not, limiting the potential damage of a cyber attack.
The funding award will see SCI receive a grant worth 50% of the project value targeted at developing Cheri-based services that meet Britain’s defence and security challenges. It will be working on this alongside Ultra, a higher-tier defence and security tech supplier, which is providing mentoring support during the project.
“The UK government are keen to act on Security by Design, and this project will leverage Cheri technology, a key technology to delivering this capability,” said SCI chief executive Haydn Povey. “With over 70% of critical vulnerabilities and exploits [CVEs] directly linked to software memory safety issues, which form the vast majority of cyber attacks on critical systems, there is a clear need to address this systemic weakness.
“This project is directly focused on ensuring communication systems and active control systems are more robust, higher integrity, and are inherently secured against broad-based cyber attacks.”
British success story
The core ecosystem surrounding Cheri – which ultimately has its roots in a joint project between the University of Cambridge and SRI International, an American research institute – now comprises around 136 companies and employs close to 1,000 people in the Cambridge area.
There are several Cheri products in development, including Arm’s Morello board (hence Cheri), and a couple of other potentials, but they are still mostly at the developmental stage.
Nevertheless, the British government believes the technology could offer significantly enhanced protection for multiple sectors, including critical national infrastructure (CNI) such as utilities and defence.
The government now wants to overcome gaps that it believes still exist in propelling Cheri into real-world applications – resolving these gaps will be a core goal of SCI’s DTEP project, which will focus on the development of high-integrity, isolated hardware and software structures for a broad array of defence applications, including military control systems.
Earlier in 2025, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) announced work to drive adoption of Cheri, backed by a multimillion-pound fund focused on bringing commercially viable products and services to market and upskilling tech professionals and engineers in memory safety.
DSIT is also looking to do more to incentivise demand for adoption of secure-by-design systems such as Cheri, and plans to launch a programme to identify potential early adopter customers. A tender notice for a delivery partner for this particular project was published in April.
