Hushmesh — a public benefit cybersecurity start-up aimed at securing the world’s digital infrastructure — was selected as one of DIANA’s innovators in 2024, when they joined the programme under the ‘Secure Information Sharing’ challenge.
Through their solution, known as ‘the Mesh’ — a new foundationally secure global information space — Hushmesh are aiming to keep everyone safe from malicious cyberattacks or data breaches.
“Today’s cybersecurity crisis stems from the fundamental computing architecture used worldwide for the last 35 years,” says Manu Fontaine, Founder and CEO at Hushmesh.
Diagram depicting how the ‘Mesh’ seals information leaks by enabling everyone and everything to encrypt their own information, with their own keys, at global scale.
“All conventional computing systems are inherently leaky — they leak information at the lowest, smallest unit of computes, which is the computing process itself and the chip — the ‘brain’ of a computer. Traditional cybersecurity aims to patch these leaks after they occur, using tools like firewalls and antivirus software.
“At Hushmesh, we’ve figured out how to stop these leaks before they happen. We can create a global compute infrastructure that does not leak information by securing it at its lowest levels — the chip and process levels,” he explained.
“The advance has a massive impact on cybersecurity, as it removes the need for most traditional security tools, since the infrastructure is inherently secure by design. It also solves what the web never could: the global assurance of information provenance, integrity, authenticity, confidentiality, and privacy for everyone and everything, at internet scale.”
Manu Fontaine, Founder and CEO at Hushmesh.
A paradigm shift, and watershed moment
Hushmesh’s solution only became possible a couple of years ago, thanks to a chip-level breakthrough known as ‘Confidential Computing’, which keeps information private and secure even while a computer is processing it. This, alongside a computer language called ‘Rust’, which has been designed with memory-safety, performance, and scalability as the primary features of the language, was pivotal for the start-up
Confidential Computing in particular changed the way we think about information security by allowing us to keep it protected not just when being stored (“at rest”) and while being transmitted (“in transit”) — but also during the processing itself (“in use”), thanks to hardware-based protections.
“Building on this semiconductor innovation, we have reimagined the architecture of the web. The original web created in the 1990s had no built-in security. Over time, we’ve bolted on security tools, but the actual foundation is still vulnerable. Now the Mesh provides a new, inherently secure infrastructure for global information sharing.”
Thanks to their cryptographic system, “meshing into” sites, sharing data and information, and any other interaction via the Mesh is automatically encrypted with keys no humans have access to. The team at Hushmesh believe their solution will eventually replace the web as the trustworthy foundation for the world’s digital backbone.
Fast-tracking adoption
After entering the DIANA Programme, Hushmesh signed a contract with the Department of Homeland Security in the US, and later started working with the US Navy. But ultimately, they want to collaborate with the whole NATO Alliance, not just a single country:
“The Mesh solves the challenge of secure interoperability across NATO’s 32 nations,” said Fontaine. “We want to protect the information of NATO’s billion citizens.”
While Hushmesh’s code isn’t open source yet, they plan to share it with all NATO nations under NATO’s NCoDe licence for defence use cases — making it available to governments and defence contractors, and allowing nations to significantly accelerate adoption and cybersecurity standardisation across the Alliance.
“This will help us continue to co-develop and refine our solution with the defence sector, while also accelerating and strengthening our efforts in the commercial space,” added Fontaine. “We see the same foundational, cross-domain security needs across all global supply chains, be they semiconductor, software, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, you name it.”
James White, DIANA’s IT lead and Enterprise Architect added, “because of the challenges associated with federating national defence networks, NATO is very interested in adopting Zero Trust (ZT) and Data Centric Security (DCS) solutions. But while this area has been extensively studied, there are very few technical solutions in the market. We believe that Hushmesh provides a strong foundation on which a whole range of ZT and DCS capabilities can be built, potentially accelerating NATO’s roadmap to ZT and DCS by years.”
A pilot project under NATO’s new Rapid Adoption Action Plan
As a result of DIANA’s mentoring efforts, Hushmesh has been accepted to lead one of ten pilot projects under NATO’s new Rapid Adoption Action Plan. The project will deliver a decentralised identity, authentication, and authorisation capability that will provide the security foundation for DIANA’s new set of tools for innovators called DIANA OS. They are also launching their ‘Meshaging’ pilot for secure messaging and file sharing built on the Mesh infrastructure, which was their first application they developed for the DIANA programme.
Meshaging is a universal messaging application built on the Mesh infrastructure.
Manu Fontaine said: “Because we have such a foundational innovation with broad applicability, being part of the DIANA programme was particularly valuable to us. There is no way a small start-up like us would have obtained access to contractors and end-users across the Alliance in the way we did. That, to me, is the main benefit of the programme: discovering and understanding the defence industry — from how our technology could fill capability gaps, to understanding the language of the end-user.
“Without DIANA, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We look forward to transforming our latest pilot projects into broader adoption of our solution within NATO and across Allied nations.”