Adding hardware protections to software ones in order to block the ever increasing onslaught of computer malware seems like a solid idea, and a group of researchers have just been given a $275,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help them work on a possible solution: malware-detecting CPUs.

This project, titled “Practical Hardware-Assisted Always-On Malware Detection,” will be trying out a new approach: they will modify a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) chip to feature logic checks for anomalies that can crop up while software is running.