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.
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 its 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.
Give feedback on this opportunity space
Help inform the development of the programme thesis by providing feedback or registering interest in taking part in a roundtable.
Meet the programme team
Our Programme Directors are supported by a Programme Specialist (P-Spec) and Technical Specialist (T-Spec); this is the nucleus of each programme team. P-Specs co-ordinate and oversee the project management of their respective programmes, whilst T-Specs provide highly specialised and targeted technical expertise to support programmatic rigour.
Alex Obadia
Programme Director
Alex is an entrepreneur, researcher, and early-stage investor exploring the frontiers of quantum cryptography. He co-founded Flashbots, a unicorn R&D organisation working to preserve the decentralisation and permissionlessness of blockchain systems. Flashbots’ R&D sparked the 'MEV' industry and its software has helped generate nearly £1.7bn.
Sarath Murugan
Programme Specialist
Sarath joined ARIA from a business operations and strategy role in a defence engineering scale-up, where his team developed a product that brought the capabilities of gen-AI to the disconnected-edge. He holds an LLB from Bristol, and has experience in project and product-facing roles. Sarath supports ARIA as an operating partner from Pace.
Nicola Greco
External Technical Advisor
Nicola is a cryptography researcher and investor. Over the last decade, he has led Protocol Labs' Cryptography R&D team who pioneered the use of zero-knowledge cryptography, and was the first check in multiple unicorns. Previously, he was a fellow at the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society and a PhD student at MIT advised by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
Our other opportunity spaces
Our opportunity spaces are designed as an open invitation for researchers from across disciplines and institutions to learn with us and contribute – a variety of perspectives are just what we need to change what’s possible.