Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) are working together to create a self-healing cloud computing network that can defend against cyberattacks.

InformationWeek reports that existing computer networks shut down when they are attacked, regardless of which portion was hit. Researchers hope to create a new model that is capable of sensing an attack when it occurs and defending against it.

“Much like the human body has a monitoring system that can detect when everything is running normally, our hypothesis is that a successful attack appears as an anomaly in the normal operating activity of the system,” explained Professor Martin Rinard, the principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “By observing the execution of a ‘normal’ cloud system we’re going to the heart of what we want to preserve about the system, which should hopefully keep the cloud safe from attack.”