Security Research & Defense

Azure Serial Console Attack and Defense - Part 2

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

This is the second installment of the Azure Serial Console blog, which provides insights to improve defenders’ preparedness when investigating Azure Serial Console activity on Azure Linux virtual machines. While the first blog post discussed various tracing activities, such as using Azure activity and Sysmon logs on Windows virtual machines to trace serial console activity, this blog outlines how to enable logging for Azure Linux virtual machines using Sysmon for Linux to capture and how to send these events to a log analytics workspace.

• Security Research
• Microsoft Threat Hunting
• Azure Serial Console

Microsoft mitigated exposure of internal information in a storage account due to overly-permissive SAS token

Monday, September 18, 2023

Summary As part of a recent Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) report from Wiz.io, Microsoft investigated and remediated an incident involving a Microsoft employee who shared a URL for a blob store in a public GitHub repository while contributing to open-source AI learning models. This URL included an overly-permissive Shared Access Signature (SAS) token for an internal storage account.

• Azure
• Security
• Security Researcher
• Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure
• CVD

Azure Serial Console Attack and Defense - Part 1

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Ever had a virtual machine crash? Azure Serial console is a great way to directly connect to your Virtual machine and debug what went wrong. Azure Serial Console is a feature that’s available for free for everyone. While the primary intent of this feature is to assist users debug their machine, there are several interesting ways to abuse the features and compromise sensitive information.

• Security Research
• Microsoft Threat Hunting
• Azure Serial Console

Hey Yara, find some vulnerabilities

Thursday, June 08, 2023

Intro Finding vulnerabilities in software is no easy task by itself. Doing this at cloud scale is very challenging to perform manually, and we use tools to help us identify patterns or vulnerability signatures. Yara is one of those tools. Yara is a very popular tool with Blue teams, malware researchers, and for good reason.

• Vulnerability
• Security Research
• Yara
• Static Code Analysis

Best practices regarding Azure Storage Keys, Azure Functions, and Azure Role Based Access

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Summary Azure provides developers and security operations staff a wide array of configurable security options to meet organizational needs. Throughout the software development lifecycle, it is important for customers to understand the shared responsibility model, as well as be familiar with various security best practices. This is particularly important in deploying Azure Functions and in provisioning Azure Role Based Access Control as customers are responsible for configuring and managing applications, identity, and data.

• Azure

First steps in CHERIoT Security Research

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

At Microsoft, we invest a lot of time researching and investigating possibilities in our journey to memory safety. Because the massive majority of existing codebases are written in unsafe programming languages, the task of protecting legacy code is very important. Hardware solutions are an attractive approach because they introduce very powerful security properties with low overheads compared to purely software solutions.

Announcing the Microsoft Machine Learning Membership Inference Competition (MICO)

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new competition focusing on the security and privacy of machine learning (ML) systems. Machine learning has already become a key enabler in many products and services, and this trend is likely to continue. It is therefore critical to understand the security and privacy guarantees provided by state-of-the-art ML algorithms – indeed this is one of Microsoft’s Responsible AI Principles.

• AI/ML
• Attack
• Security Research

What’s the smallest variety of CHERI?

Tuesday, September 06, 2022

The Portmeirion project is a collaboration between Microsoft Research Cambridge, Microsoft Security Response Center, and Azure Silicon Engineering & Solutions. Over the past year, we have been exploring how to scale the key ideas from CHERI down to tiny cores on the scale of the cheapest microcontrollers. These cores are very different from the desktop and server-class processors that have been the focus of the Morello project.

Randomizing the KUSER_SHARED_DATA Structure on Windows

Tuesday, April 05, 2022

Windows 10 made a lot of improvements in Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) that increases the cost of exploitation, particularly for remote code execution exploits. Many kernel virtual address space (VAS) locations including kernel stacks, pools, system PTEs etc. are randomized. A well-known exception to this is the KUSER_SHARED_DATA structure which is a page of memory that has always been traditionally mapped at a fixed virtual address in the kernel.

• Mitigations

Exploring a New Class of Kernel Exploit Primitive

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

The security landscape is dynamic, changing often and as a result, attack surfaces evolve. MSRC receives a wide variety of cases spanning different products, bug types and exploit primitives. One particularly interesting primitive we see is an arbitrary kernel pointer read. These often happen when kernel mode code does not validate that pointers read from attacker-controlled input actually point to the user-mode portion of the Virtual Address Space (VAS).

• Security Research