The new architecture could help interrupt the infinite cycle of vulnerability discovery and patching by making vulnerabilities less useful, says Todd Austin, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan and a leader of the Morpheus project. "The vast majority of work in the computer-science space is 'how do I find and how do I fix vulnerabilities?'" he says. "We are on the other side. Our technology recognizes that an exploit is different than a vulnerability, so we ask, 'what are the juicy bits that attackers want to get access to after they have found a vulnerability?" — that's pointers, code, address space, organization, and a variety of other things, and those are what we encrypt."