About Us

Capabilities Limited offers the deep industry knowledge of software and hardware security necessary to help solve the most complex issues in security and privacy. The founders and staff have extensive experience in industry and academia and have been instrumental in various security and privacy projects, including CHERI, OpenSSL and Certificate Transparency. We are currently working with Google, University of Cambridge, DARPA, UKRI, SRI and Arm on a number of projects to build and experiment with advanced security.

Our Founders

Capabilities Limited was founded by Professor Robert N. M. Watson and Mr Ben Laurie

Robert Watson

Prof. Robert Watson is a Director of Capabilities Limited, and also a Professor in Systems, Security, and Architecture at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

He is the Principal Investigator leading the development of CHERI at the University of Cambridge and SRI International. He is a strong advocate of, and contributor to, open-source software, including being a FreeBSD developer, board member (past President) of the FreeBSD Foundation and coauthor of the Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System.

Ben Laurie

Ben Laurie is a Director of Capabilities Limited, and also key technical lead in security in Google Research.

As an extremely proficient programmer and system designer with over 30 years experience, he has played a significant role in creating a number of key open-source projects including the Apache Software Foundation (primarily Apache-SSL) which powers more than half the world’s secure Web sites, OpenSSL the world’s most widely used open source cryptographic library, and has been involved in the creation of the CHERI ISA and Certificate Transparency.

About Us

Our Founders

Our Clients