Astute Group has signed a distribution agreement with SCI Semiconductor, the secure-by-design specialist .
SCI’s ICENI family of CHERI-enabled MCUs, with hardware enforced memory safety, arecnowcaccessible to customers worldwide.
The 100% memory safe ICENI family of high integrity microcontrollers achieves cyber-protection at the foundation of the digital domain – ensuring scalable security and robust isolation of software, addressing critical vulnerabilities associated with memory safety issues.
The technology is relevant for a diverse array of applications requiring uncompromising security, from critical national infrastructure (energy generation, water processing, transportation), defence and aerospace for mission-critical systems, and Industrial Automation (Industry 4.0) to secure cyber-physical systems, automotive systems for enhanced platform security, and medical applications required to meet stringent IEC 62304 standards.
“Our role is to bring the world’s most advanced technology to our clients, and it is particularly significant when that revolutionary technology originates from the UK,” stated Andrew Parker, Technical BDM at Astute Group. ”SCI’s technology directly supports pressing government and industry mandates worldwide aimed at enhancing digital resilience through secure-by-design hardware. The ICENI family is a true game-changer, and we are proud to be the international partner delivering this hardware-first security approach to our customers, enabling them to build systems that are not just secure by design, but secure by default.”
“The UK has a long history of spearheading foundational technologies, and we are proud to commercialise years of UK-led research into a product that stops critical software vulnerabilities,” said Haydn Povey, CEO of SCI Semiconductor. ”This partnership with Astute is about scaling that innovation. We are giving engineers in critical industries direct access to a technology that slashes the lifetime cost of product security by eliminating entire classes of memory safety vulnerabilities in hardware. Astute’s technical expertise and global reach are essential to help our customers fully leverage this power and build the next generation of trusted systems.
SCI Semiconductor’s core innovation, based on CHERI technology, directly tackles memory safety issues, a key factor in almost all cyber-attacks.
By enforcing security at the hardware level, through memory compartmentalisation and tightly controlled access, SCI Semiconductor’s devices substantially reduce cybersecurity costs and the necessity for constant software patching
.lBorn out of DARPA and SRI, the UK has taken a leadership role in development and exploration of the CHERI hardware-enforced memory safety technology via leading academic institutes led by the University of Cambridge, together with many others including Oxford and Manchester.
The ICENI device family utilises the CHERI architecture to provide 100% memory safety guarantees with assured, hardware-enforced protection for software.
This technology was central to the UK Government’s £70 million Digital Security by Design (DSbD) programme, a major national initiative which has successfully matured the CHERI ecosystem, making it ready for widespread commercial adoption.
By creating unhackable hardware protections, the ICENI family offers deterministic protection against prevalent software exploits, including buffer overflows and return-oriented programming, offering a level of security and reliability that is essential for critical national infrastructure, modern connected devices, and Industrial IoT.
