Skip to main content
MSRC

jobialek

Building Faster AMD64 Memset Routines

Monday, January 11, 2021

Over the past several years, Microsoft has rolled out several changes that result in more memory being zeroed. These mitigations include: The InitAll mitigation which zeros most stack variables Switching most Microsoft kernel code over to the ExAllocatePool2/ExAllocatePool3 API’s which zero memory by default. Where possible the compiler will unroll calls to memset.

Solving Uninitialized Kernel Pool Memory on Windows

Thursday, July 02, 2020

This blog post outlines the work that Microsoft is doing to eliminate uninitialized kernel pool memory vulnerabilities from Windows and why we’re on this path. For a background on why uninitialized memory matters and what options have been used in the past to tackle this issue, please see our previous blog post.

Solving Uninitialized Stack Memory on Windows

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

This blog post outlines the work that Microsoft is doing to eliminate uninitialized stack memory vulnerabilities from Windows and why we’re on this path. This blog post will be broken down into a few parts that folks can jump to: Uninitialized Memory Background Potential Solutions to Uninitialized Memory Vulnerabilities InitAll – Automatic Initialization Interesting Findings with InitAll Performance Optimizations Impact for Customers Forward Looking Plans None of this work would have been possible without close partnership between the Visual Studio organization, the Windows organization, and MSRC.