Fungal systems for security and resilience

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.