Soteria - Demonstrating the Security Capabilities of the Morello System in the e-commerce Vertical Industrial Segment

According to Greek mythology, **Soteria** was the goddess or spirit of safety and salvation, deliverance, and preservation from harm.

The Soteria project is a cyber security demonstrator for the e-commerce industrial market. Of UK businesses last year, 46% reported attacks or breaches with a mean cost £4000 for nano/small companies experiencing breaches. Soteria is motivated by the commitment of The Hut Group (THG) to have the best possible security protection for its e-commerce and hosting business.

This extends to wanting to understand how future Arm hardware, as represented by the Morello platform, could improve the security of its business and enable the development of new cyber security services and products.

The project is led by THG, a world leader in the e-commerce sector where it operates by ensuring that its e-commerce services and datacentre hosting provide advanced security technologies. THG's e-commerce platform runs on datacentres across the world, and it is under constant attack due to its prominent market position. THG has accumulated wide-ranging cyber security experience, and a growing volume of collected data from such attacks.

The University of Manchester will provide technical expertise on managed runtimes, such as Java Virtual Machines (JVM), smart network technologies, and business optimisation (impact quantification of the demonstrator on THG and the e-commerce sector); and the University of Oxford with expertise in formal verification. THG will provide project management, assessment and reporting.

An example of new technology that will be developed by Soteria is a JVM capable of harnessing the new security capabilities of Arm-Morello. A JVM is a complex software needed to execute the most popular programming languages; e.g. Javascript/Java/Python/Ruby. Thus, Soteria has the potential to improve the security of a large share of the software that as society we have come to rely upon.

The benefits of Soteria are directly focused on reducing the impact of security breaches and attacks, and the costs required to secure digital businesses and services. The societal impacts are improved public perception to the benefits of technology, and less disruption to the daily activities of individuals in society due to security incidents, and service outages across public, government, and paid for digital services.

Demonstrating the enhanced security capabilities and development of related products strengthens the global and, especially, UK impact to online business, the public and government services and objectives. Finally, Soteria constitutes the basis for a software ecosystem capable of protecting against future cyber-attacks.