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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Thursday, January 20, 2022
Today, Arm announced that the first silicon supporting the Morello prototype architecture, a research project led by Arm, Microsoft, University of Cambridge and others, is now available on a limited run of demonstration boards, which are being shipped from today to industry partners for testing. Morello is the first high-performance implementation of the CHERI extensions.
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.
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Is it possible to get to a state where memory safety issues would be deterministically mitigated? Our quest to mitigate memory corruption vulnerabilities led us to examine CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions), which provides memory protection features against many exploited vulnerabilities, or in other words, an architectural solution that breaks exploits.
Monday, August 17, 2020
As part of our ongoing efforts towards safer systems programming, we’re pleased to announce that Windows Control Flow Guard (CFG) support is now available in the Clang C/C++ compiler and Rust. What is Control Flow Guard? CFG is a platform security technology designed to enforce control flow integrity. It has been available since Windows 8.
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.
