A living textile is a fabric or textile system that includes active biological components during production or use, such as fungi, bacteria, or living cells. Unlike inert cloth, it can grow, change, or be maintained through biological processes. That makes it a materials concept as much as a manufacturing one.
In cyber security, living textiles matter because biofabrication often depends on controlled environments, sensors, software, and digital recipes. Attackers could target production controls, contaminate process data, alter growth conditions, or tamper with design files to affect quality and safety. Defenders protect these systems with network segregation, strict access control, integrity checks, logging, and provenance tracking. The security challenge is to keep both the biology and the digital workflow trustworthy.