Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Updated September 10, 2018 The Servicing Criteria for Windows has transitioned to an official document and can be found at the link below. Microsoft thanks the members of the research community who provided feedback on the draft copy. Microsoft Security Servicing Criteria for Windows
Monday, May 21, 2018
In January, 2018, Microsoft published 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 an additional subclass of speculative execution side channel vulnerability known as Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) which has been assigned CVE-2018-3639.
Thursday, May 03, 2018
The security of Microsoft’s cloud services is a top priority for us. One of the technologies that is central to cloud security is Microsoft Hyper-V which we use to isolate tenants from one another in the cloud. Given the importance of this technology, Microsoft has made and continues to make significant investment in the security of Hyper-V and the powerful security features that it enables, such as Virtualization-Based Security (VBS).
Wednesday, April 04, 2018
DLL planting (aka binary planting/hijacking/preloading) resurface every now and then, it is not always clear on how Microsoft will respond to the report. This blog post will try to clarify the parameters considered while triaging DLL planting issues. It is well known that when an application loads a DLL without specifying a fully qualified path, Windows attempts to locate the DLL by searching a well-defined set of directories in an order known as DLL search order.
Friday, March 23, 2018
On January 3rd, 2018, Microsoft released an advisory and security updates that relate to a new class of discovered hardware vulnerabilities, termed speculative execution side channels, that affect the design methodology and implementation decisions behind many modern microprocessors. This post dives into the technical details of Kernel Virtual Address (KVA) Shadow which is the Windows kernel mitigation for one specific speculative execution side channel: the rogue data cache load vulnerability (CVE-2017-5754, also known as “Meltdown” or “Variant 3”).
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
On January 3rd, 2018, Microsoft released an advisory and security updates related to a newly discovered class of hardware vulnerabilities involving speculative execution side channels (known as Spectre and Meltdown) that affect AMD, ARM, and Intel CPUs to varying degrees. If you haven’t had a chance to learn about these issues, we recommend watching The Case of Spectre and Meltdown by the team at TU Graz from BlueHat Israel, reading the blog post by Jann Horn (@tehjh) of Google Project Zero, or reading the FOSDEM 2018 presentation by Jon Masters of Red Hat.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Last week, the CERT/CC published an advisory describing some unexpected behavior they observed when enabling system-wide mandatory Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) using Windows Defender Exploit Guard (WDEG) and EMET on Windows 8 and above. In this blog post, we will explain the configuration issue that CERT/CC encountered and describe work arounds to enable the desired behavior.
Tuesday, October 03, 2017
The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) receives reports about potential vulnerabilities in our products and it’s the job of our engineering team to assess the severity, impact, and root cause of these issues. In practice, a significant proportion of these reports turn out to be memory corruption issues. In order to root cause these issues, an MSRC security engineer typically needs to analyze the crash and try to understand what went wrong.
Wednesday, August 09, 2017
Since we last wrote about the future of EMET and how it relates to Windows 10 back in November 2016 (see Moving Beyond EMET), we have received lots of invaluable feedback from EMET customers and enthusiasts regarding the upcoming EMET end of life. Based on that feedback, we are excited to share significant new exploit protection and threat mitigation improvements coming with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update!
Thursday, July 20, 2017
Introduction We are continuing our series of blog posts dissecting the exploits released by ShadowBrokers in April 2017. After the first two posts about the SMB exploits known as EternalChampion and EternalSynergy, we’ll move this time to analyze a different tool and we’ll focus on the exploit named EnglishmansDentist designed to target Exchange Server 2003.
