UCL and Dragonfly win funding for safer software stack decisions

UCL School of Management and Dragonfly have been awarded £704,863 ($1 million) to develop next-generation AI systems that help businesses make safer technology decisions across complex software environments. The project targets a growing gap in enterprise security, where organisations rely on hundreds of software tools but often lack the expertise to assess how those tools interact.

The 18-month effort will turn the UK Government’s Software Security Code of Practice into a machine-queryable trust layer for evaluating whole technology stacks rather than individual vendors. The system will sit on Dragonfly’s knowledge graph of more than 300,000 software vendors, encode all 14 SSCoP principles, and map them to standards including ISO 27001, NIS2 and the EU Cyber Resilience Act.

The platform is designed to identify weak links, shadow IT exposure, data-flow risks and integration issues, then present citation-backed recommendations in plain language for non-technical decision makers. The work is supported by Innovate UK’s Secure Software for Resilient Growth competition and will be led at UCL by Professor Onesun Steve Yoo with co-investigators Dr Yi-Chun Akchen, Dr Yuri Resende Fonseca and Dr Aras Selvi.