ARIA’s “Trust Everything, Everywhere” opportunity space aims to explore trust ‘building blocks’ similar to encryption. These enable digital industries to flourish securely, but they don’t extend into the physical world. With emerging technology blurring the line between digital and physical, a new trust infrastructure that straddles both worlds could unlock cyber-physical markets.
The core beliefs that underpin this opportunity space:
- Creating a new trust infrastructure will unlock the cyber-physical economy. The trust building blocks that enabled today’s £24-trillion digital economy, like encryption and cryptographic signatures, do not extend to the physical world.
- Formal security reasoning is key to designing new cyber-physical trust building blocks: rooted in different assumptions (e.g. quantum physics instead of computational hardness), and living in alternative informational substrates (e.g. DNA instead of bits).
- AI will make secure cyber-physical interactions accessible to everyone. The next generation of trust infrastructure will allow AI systems to generate customised, on-demand protocols in situ for any given cyber-physical interaction, spanning atoms, molecules, waves, and bits.
ARIA’s activities in this space are exploring:
- Substrate-agnostic, AI-generated security protocols – enabling agent collaboration in digital and physical adversarial environments using cryptography, trusted hardware and other similar capabilities
- Security primitives for biology, especially for biosecurity (vaccine obfuscation etc.)
- Verifiable manufacturing/self-driving labs/autonomous supply chains
- Security-like behaviours in nature
- Classical to quantum trust-minimised communication (practical remote state preparation, remote state measurement)
- Neuro-privacy, and neural interfaces security technology
ARIA are now looking to develop an ambitious research programme within this space. To help inform direction and build community, ARIA are looking to fund c.3-month exploratory projects with up to £20,000 each.
We welcome proposals that fall into one of these four tracks:
- Track 1: Systemisation of knowledge – In-depth analyses of topics relevant to the opportunity space.
- Track 2: Applied agentic challenges – Design and prototype implementation of games to help us measure the current state of the art in multi-agent coordination and surface new agentic capabilities.
- Track 3: Ethical and risk analysis – Analyses of ethical considerations and risks we should be mindful of as we consider funding tools and infrastructure for multi-agent coordination.
- Track 4: Community building in the UK, and beyond – Events, educational content, website and other such community-driven efforts to grow multi-disciplinary R&D communities in the UK and beyond who are relevant to the opportunity space.
ARIA proposals are accepted from scientists and engineers at universities, research institutes, startups, and established companies, as well as from individuals. Applicants can be based in the UK or abroad.
More details including what is in and out of scope can be found in the call for proposals on ARIA’s website.
ARIA are also hosting a webinar on Wednesday 22 October at 16:00 to present our current thinking around the thesis, followed by Q&A from the audience. You can find more information and instructions to register here.