National security is an ‘arms race’ says boss of chip designer Arm

The executive vice president of Arm has said that UK national infrastructure security is an “arms race” as more and more of our lives become dependent on technology.

Richard Grisenthwaite, who is also chief architect at the Cambridge-based chip designer, said that although national infrastructure is improving, there is a “tremendous amount” of building that needs to be done to ensure it is secure.

“I would observe that security is an arms race,” he said. “Any time you deal with any problem, the attackers get more sophisticated and we’ve seen that progressively at Arm with many forms of attack.

“It’s very important to also recognise that there is no one magic solution to security,” Grisenthwaite told the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on Wednesday.

During the conversation, which revolved around the cyber resilience of the UK’s critical national infrastructure, he also warned that the most basic security principles need to be rock solid before institutions worry about the really sophisticated attacks.

Grisenthwaite said: “Increasingly we have to recognise that the entirety of society is interacting digitally, interacting online, and so everything is becoming part of the national infrastructure or else we’ll be back in the 1840s and communicating by waving at each other.

“That means that these technologies for security, we shouldn’t think oh this only applies to this particular small niche increasingly we need security and secure design principles in all of our technologies,” he added.

Arm designs the crucial microchips that are used in data centres, cars and devices such as smartphones. The company, which floated in New York last year, is also part of a government initiative called digital security by design, which aims to build trust in technology.

The Committee also heard from John Goodacre, professor of computer architecture at the University of Manchester.

Recently, the minister for artificial intelligence (AI) urged British businesses to shore up their cyber attack defences.

It came after new government data revealed that three-quarters of medium and large-sized businesses were hit by a cyber incident in the past year.