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About Us
The Directors of Capabilities Limited were instrumental in the creation of CHERI, with significant contributions from Professor Watson, who led the development of the architecture as Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge. Our team, which includes several experts recruited directly from Cambridge, has been central to CHERI’s progress through various stages of development.
Capabilities Limited has played a leading role in foundational projects such as the initial desktop study, a comprehensive desktop implementation project, and a server project. Our DARPA-supported work modelling CHERI-x86 has informed secure architectural advancements. We have also contributed to compartmentalisation efforts, security-focused applications of seL4 on Morello and CHERI-RISC-V, and formal modelling of CHERI-RISC-V in Sail.
In addition, our team has a pivotal role in guiding CHERI Alliance working groups, notably CHERI Linux, and we continue to support RISC-V standardisation efforts, ensuring that CHERI principles are embedded within the broader ecosystem of secure, open hardware. Capabilities Limited remains committed to advancing CHERI’s objectives, promoting innovative, secure architectural solutions across multiple platforms and industries. 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.