Fungal systems for security and resilience

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of living fungal mycelial networks as biohybrid systems to enhance security, resilience, and protection in extreme environments, leveraging their natural properties for distributed sensing and self-healing.

Contribution

It introduces fungi as a novel biohybrid platform for security and resilience, highlighting their potential in sensing, repair, and anomaly detection in challenging conditions.

Findings

Fungi can serve as distributed sensing substrates.

Mycelial networks exhibit self-healing capabilities.

Fungal properties can be mapped to security applications.

Abstract

Modern security, infrastructure, and safety-critical systems increasingly operate in environments characterised by disruption, uncertainty, physical damage, and degraded communications. Conventional digital technologies -- centralised sensors, software-defined control, and energy-intensive monitoring -- often struggle under such conditions. We propose fungi, and in particular living mycelial networks, as a novel class of biohybride systems for security, resilience, and protection in extreme environments. We discuss how fungi can function as distributed sensing substrates, self-healing materials, and low-observability anomaly-detection layers. We map fungal properties -- such as decentralised control, embodied memory, and autonomous repair -- to applications in infrastructure protection, environmental monitoring, tamper evidence, and long-duration resilience.