Future DOD cloud would repair itself after cyberattack

The Defense Department's research arm is funding an effort to develop a cloud computing environment that can repair itself after a cyberattack, reports Information Week.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is working on a new system that would enable a cloud network to identify an attack and recover from it right away as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds project, the article says.

"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," Martin Rinard, a principal investigator at CSAIL, said in a news release. "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."