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MSRC

2018

Vulnerability hunting with Semmle QL, part 1

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Previously on this blog, we’ve talked about how MSRC automates the root cause analysis of vulnerabilities reported and found. After doing this, our next step is variant analysis: finding and investigating any variants of the vulnerability. It’s important that we find all such variants and patch them simultaneously, otherwise we bear the risk of these being exploited in the wild. In this post, I’d like to explain the automation we use in variant finding.

For the past year or so, we’ve been augmenting our manual code review processes with Semmle, a third-party static analysis environment. It compiles code to a relational database (the snapshot database – a combination of database and source code), which is queried using Semmle QL, a declarative, object-oriented query language designed for program analysis.

The basic workflow is that, after root cause analysis, we write queries to find code patterns that are semantically similar to the original vulnerability. Any results are triaged as usual and provided to our engineering teams for a fix to be developed. Also, the queries are placed in a central repository to be re-run periodically by MSRC and other security teams. This way, we can scale our variant finding over time and across multiple codebases.

In addition to variant analysis, we’ve been using QL proactively, in our security reviews of source code. This will be the topic of a future blog post. For now, let’s look at some real-world examples inspired by MSRC cases.

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Analysis and mitigation of L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF)

Monday, August 13, 2018

In January 2018, Microsoft released an advisory and security updates for a new class of hardware vulnerabilities involving speculative execution side channels (known as Spectre and Meltdown). In this blog post, we will provide a technical analysis of a new speculative execution side channel vulnerability known as L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) which has been assigned CVE-2018-3615 (for SGX), CVE-2018-3620 (for operating systems and SMM), and CVE-2018-3646 (for virtualization).

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Microsoft’s Top 100 Security Researchers – Black Hat 2018 Edition

Wednesday, August 08, 2018

This morning we are excited to unveil the security researcher leaderboard at the Black Hat Security Conference. This list recognizes the top security researchers who have contributed research to the Microsoft products and services. If you are curious on how we build the list, check out our blog from last week on The Making of the Top 100 Researcher List.

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Announcing the BlueHat v18 Schedule

Thursday, August 02, 2018

Where did the summer go? This year the BlueHat Security Conference moved forward in the schedule to late September. Next year it will settle into a steady orbit of early October moving forward. With that change in schedule, it is hard to believe that it is time to reveal the schedule for BlueHat v18.

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The Making of the Top 100 Researcher List

Wednesday, August 01, 2018

At Black Hat USA each year, we unveil the Top 100 Security Researcher list to reflect the amazing engagement we get from the community. During this period, we had several thousand researchers engage with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC). We appreciate all the partnership and coordination that goes on throughout the year.

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Recognizing Q4 Top 5 Bounty Hunters

Thursday, July 26, 2018

We have tabulated the results from April-June 2018. The Top 5 Bounty Hunters for Q4 are now in. As with our list from Q3, we want to recognize both the leaders in payouts and in number of successful submissions. We appreciate the hard work and dedication of the following individuals and companies who have contributed to securing Microsoft’s products and services over our fourth quarter.

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