Arm Morello Program

Morello is a research program with the potential to radically change the way we design and program processors in the future to improve built-in security. Funded by the UK government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) Digital Security by Design (DSbD) program and led by Arm, Morello has a transformative goal to radically update the security foundations of the digital computing infrastructure that underpins the entire global economy. The main anticipated output of DSbD is a technology platform prototype, designed and produced by Arm: The Morello evaluation board.

Morello focuses on new ways of designing CPU architecture that can make processors more robust and deter certain key security breaches. As part of an additional 5-year research program funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Morello will be used to produce and test a prototype technology that, if successful, could be implemented in future hardware.

Arm is collaborating with the University of Cambridge and SRI International on its Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) architecture. Arm has developed a prototype architecture that adapts the hardware concepts of CHERI.

This new approach to cybersecurity requires extensive exploration work and involves a significant change in how the architecture of the hardware is designed and how software running on devices is programed to take advantage of the new features.

Using this new technology, Arm has designed a prototype system-on-chip (SoC) and a development board, called the Morello board. This will enable industry and academic partners to test the new prototype architecture in real-world use cases.

Timescale

The Morello program started in October 2019, and will span a 5-year period. Arm has since announced the release of the Morello demonstrator board on schedule in January 2022. Over 2022, hundreds of Morello boards will be shipped to companies, universities, and government labs for experimentation and evaluation. The remainder of the project time will be available for testing and feedback by the industry ecosystem.