Newmanry Labs
What if you couldn’t trust the screen in front of you?
For years, cybersecurity experts have worked to defend businesses, data and infrastructure from a wide spectrum of digital vulnerabilities.
But as threat actors become more sophisticated, new blind spots are emerging…
We tend to think of a computer screen as exactly that: a screen.
But behind the glass is a device with its own hardware, software, and a direct two-way connection back to the computer it is attached to.
It is that seemingly trustworthy connection which creates a risk.
We tend to treat display screens as passive. In reality, they can communicate back through the connection.
That creates a largely overlooked blind spot for cybersecurity.
As industry focused on protecting devices through layers of software, firewalls, and threat detection. Newmanry Labs sought a different approach…
We’re starting to see a trend where threat actors are prepositioning themselves on wholesale commodity hardware. And the same threat poses itself for displays.
The wholesale are produced in volume, and we simply do not have the tools and capabilities to know whether our displays are compromised or not.
Do not trust the connection
Display screens are manufactured, shipped, and sold at scale.
The wholesale nature meant that high-assurance security checks on individual displays would cost time, money, and resources.
Newmanry’s research indicated the problem did not come down to a single make or model, but instead, was a wider vulnerability across the entire classification of assets.
From the West Midlands, Newmanry Labs decided to address the threat with a bigger question….
Rather than improving cybersecurity software and better detecting threats, at Newmanry Labs, we looked beyond that and questioned whether we can even trust the connection in the first place.
A different answer: Silent Glass
A device that mediates communication between a computer and a display. Acting as a controlled gateway, Silent Glass allows a display to receive video from the computer but prevents it from communicating information back.
The concept of Silent Glass did not start at Newmanry Labs.
It was first developed and prototyped by the UK National Cybersecurity Centre, which knew that to truly scale its IP required a partner that could innovate and shape government-developed technology into a commercially viable product.
The NCSC put the opportunity out to tender, attracting bids from some of the UK’s largest defence primes.
We thought we’ve got no chance. But it turned out they didn’t want someone to just be a contract manufacturer. They wanted someone who had that spirit and that engineering drive to not only take that underlying IP but then create something greater out of it.
Newmanry Labs was selected for its engineering drive and ability to innovate at speed. In seeing off competition from major defence primes, the NCSC’s decision to select Newmanry Labs was significant…
But why?
In displaying its ingenuity and challenging the conventional approach with Silent Glass, Newmanry Labs demonstrated what smaller innovators can bring to government-backed technology.
Newmanry’s experience also shows what this model can unlock: giving smaller innovators the opportunity to take government-developed technology into the market and broadening the pool of companies able to work in defence and security.
Having such a large entity behind you to be able to support and provide that market access really does help us as an SME to be able to scale out beyond what we would have been able to do on our own. It will be the same for others as well.
First principles, rooted in the West Midlands
Looking at a problem differently is how Newmanry Labs operates.
The firm’s first-principles mindset sits behind its engineering approach. Newmanry Labs isn’t satisfied with knowing what something does; it wants to understand why it works.
Rather than simply manufacture the Silent Glass IP as designed, Newmanry saw it as a starting point: something to develop, improve and build on. It was that engineering curiosity, alongside its ability to move quickly, that helped turn the Silent Glass concept into a commercial product.
That ability to innovate quickly is closely linked to where Newmanry Labs is based.
Located at the University of Wolverhampton Science Park, the firm’s R&D team is entirely local, all within a 20-minute radius.
The access to skilled talent with a proven mindset for disruption mattered to Newmanry Labs.
We need to move fast, and we need to make sure that we’re all working well together, and we can trust each other, and it’s just something that you can only really breed when you’re all local with each other.
That close-knit collaborative approach fits a wider West Midlands tradition of engineering — taking something apart, understanding how it works and finding a better way to make it work in the real world.
If we look at our history and heritage, it’s always been in a very industrious and hard-working environment. That really does start to breed a mindset of innovators.
Having once competed against them, larger defence primes are now approaching Newmanry Labs because, while they have access to major customers and established routes into the market, they cannot always innovate at the same speed.
In the West Midlands, Newmanry Labs can.
Beyond the screen
It’s why Silent Glass is only the beginning.
Silent Glass is the first application of a wider idea. Newmanry Labs is exploring how the same approach could secure other connections between computers and peripherals, extending the principle beyond displays.
Having established traction in the UK, Newmanry Labs plans to expand across the Five Eyes markets, initially through government before moving further into defence and critical national infrastructure. Longer term, the ambition extends into wider enterprise and European markets.
A story that started with a screen is becoming something bigger.
Because rather than adding another layer of defence, Newmanry Labs asked a more fundamental question: why trust the connection in the first place?
It starts here.
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