Trust Everything, Everywhere

Trust 'building blocks', like encryption, 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.

Opportunity space

Programme development

What is an opportunity space?

Opportunity spaces are areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs. They are defined by our Programme Directors, and must be highly consequential for society, under-explored relative to their potential impact, and ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible.

Core beliefs

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.

Observations

Some signposts as to why we see this area as important, underserved, and ripe.

Download as a PDF here, or the accessible version here.

Programme development

We are in the process of building a multi-year R&D programme within this space. Our programmes are designed to advance complex, large-scale ideas that require coordinated investment and management across disciplines and institutions.

Discover our thinking

Resources

A compiled, but not exhaustive list of works helping to shape our view and frame the opportunity space (for those who want to dig deeper).

- Is Information the Key? — Gilles Brassard
- The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work — Phil Rogaway
- My Techno Optimism — Vitalik Buterin
- Why I Support Privacy — Vitalik Buterin
- Mechanisms Too Simple for Humans to Design — Telescopic Turnip
- The Quantum Thief — Hannu Rajaniemi
- Black-Hole Radiation Decoding is Quantum Cryptography — Zvika Brakerski
- Physical One-Way Functions — Pappu et al.
- A New Approach to Nuclear Warhead Verification Using a Zero-Knowledge Protocol — Glaser et al.
- Quantum Cryptography: Uncertainty in the Service of Privacy — Charles Bennett
- Consumable Data via Quantum Communication — Gilboa et al.
- Conjugate Coding— Stephen Wiesner
- Unclonable Polymers and Their Cryptographic Applications — Almashaqbeh et al.
- Building Unclonable Cryptography: A Tale of Two No-cloning Paradigms — Almashaqbeh et al.
- An Introduction to Protein Cryptography— Tirmazi et al.
- Cryptography in the DNA of Living Cells Enabled by Multi-Site Base Editing — Volf et al.
- Hidden Messages in DNA Could Reduce Biosecurity Risks — Danielle Gerhard
- Neuroscience Needs Network Science — Barabási et al.
- A New Age of Computing and the Brain — Golland et al.
- Mosquito-derived Ingested DNA as a Tool for Monitoring Terrestrial Vertebrates within a Peri-urban Environment — Chivas et al.
- Molecules that Generate Fingerprints: A New Class of Fluorescent Sensors for Chemical Biology, Medical Diagnosis, and Cryptography — Motiei et al.
- TTEE: Marrying Cryptography and Physics — Quintus Kilbourn
- Signature for Objects: Formalizing How to Authenticate Physical Data and More — Hayashi et al.
- Cryptographic Data Exchange for Nuclear Warheads — Perry et al.
- Cryptographic Sensing — Ishai et al.
- Cryptography by Cellular Automata or How Fast Can Complexity Emerge in Nature? — Applebaum et al.
- Programmable Plants — ARIA
- Programmable Mitochondria — ARIA
- AlphaGenome: AI for Better Understanding the Genome — Avsec et al.
- Zeroshot Antibody Design — Chai Discovery
- Breaking Bonds, Breaking Ground: Advancing the Accuracy of Computational Chemistry with Deep Learning — van den Berg et al.
- Osmo AI — giving computers a sense of smell
- Electric Plant Company — translating plants’ electric signals
- You Can Just Program Biology — Union Square Ventures
- Tissue-specific Modulation of CRISPR Activity by miRNA-sensing Guide RNAs — Guerra et al.
- Biology Has Scaling Laws Too — Air Street Capital Press
- A Protein Printer — Englert et al.
- The Next $10 Trillion Opportunity: Why ‘AI x Physical World’ Is Where It’s All Headed — Bilal Zuberi
- Welcome to the Era of Experience — Silver et al.
- Lila Sciences — autonomous science labs to speed up scientific experiments
- Computer-inspired Quantum Experiments — Krenn et al.
- Towards Material Abundance — Mackenzie Morehead
- Steering Towards Safe Self-Driving Laboratories — Leong et al.
- Programmable Cryptography — 0xParc
- Transparency has Value — Dionna Amalie Glaze
- In Machines We Trust — Zarinah Agnew
- Formal Methods for Secure Cyber-Physical Systems Workshop: Report on the First Edition — Wright et al.
- Formal Techniques for Verification and Testing of Cyber-Physical Systems — Deshmukh et al.
- Building a Zero-Trust Security Model for Autonomous Systems
- zkPi: Proving Lean Theorems in Zero-Knowledge — Laufer et al.
- Verified Value Chains, Innovation and Competition — Weber et al.
- IRIS (Infra-Red, in situ) Project Updates — Bunnie:studios
- SecureDNA — Baum et al.
- Eight Reasons to Prioritize Brain-Computer Interface Cybersecurity — Bernal et al.
- Secure and Secret Cooperation in Robotic Swarms — Ferrer et al.
- Owl — tool for developing cryptographic protocols with formal, machine-checked guarantees of security
- Secure Wireless Communication of Brain–computer Interface and Mind Control of Smart Devices Enabled by Space-time-coding Metasurface — Xiao et al.
- Virtual Agent Economies — Tomasev et al., 2025/09
- Defeating Prompt Injections by Design — Debenedetti et al. 2025/06
- Privacy Reasoning in Ambiguous Contexts — Yi et al., 2025/06
- Open Challenges in Multi-Agent Security: Towards Secure Systems of Interacting AI Agents — Schroeder de Witt, 2025/05
- NDAI Agreements — Stephenson et al., 2025/02
- Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography — Shumailov et al., 2025/01
- Infrastructure for AI Agents — Chain et al., 2025/01
- Learning Collusion in Episodic, Inventory-Constrained Markets — Friedrich et al., 2024/10
- AgentDojo: A Dynamic Environment to Evaluate Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses for LLM Agents — Debenedetti et al. 2024/06
- Language Models Can Reduce Asymmetry in Information Markets — Ramahan et al. 2024/03
- Do LLM Agents Have Regret? A Case Study in Online Learning and Games — Park et al., 2024/03
- Mechanism Design for Large Language Models — Dütting et al., 2023
- SSITH: System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware — DARPA
- AISS: Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon — DARPA
- QuANET: Quantum-augmented Network — DARPA
- COMPASS: Critical Orientation of Mathematics to Produce Advancements in Science and Security — DARPA
- PROVERS: Pipelined Reasoning of Verifiers Enabling Robust Systems — DARPA
- Cyber-physical Problems — NCSC.GOV.UK

Sign up for updates

Stay up-to-date on our opportunity spaces and programmes, be the first to know about our funding calls and get the latest news from ARIA.