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.
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.
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Our team, DeisLabs, recently released a new piece of software called Krustlet, which is a tool for running WebAssembly modules on the popular, open-source container management tool called Kubernetes. Kubernetes is used quite extensively to run cloud software across many vendors and companies and is primarily written in the Go programming language.
Thursday, November 07, 2019
This Saturday 9th of November, there will be a keynote from Microsoft engineers Ryan Levick and Sebastian Fernandez at RustFest Barcelona. They will be talking about why Microsoft is exploring Rust adoption, some of the challenges we’ve faced in this process, and the future of Rust adoption in Microsoft. If you want to talk with some of the people working on how Microsoft is evolving its code practices for better security, be sure to attend the keynote and talk to Ryan and Sebastian afterwards!
Wednesday, November 06, 2019
In two previous blog posts ( part 1 and part 2), we talked about using Semmle QL in C and C++ codebases to find vulnerabilities such as integer overflow, path traversal, and those leading to memory corruption. In this post, we will explore applying Semmle QL to web security by hunting for one of the most common type of client-side vulnerabilities: DOM-based cross-site scripting (XSS).
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Over the course of my internship at the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), I worked on the safe systems programming languages (SSPL) team to promote safer languages for systems programming where runtime overhead is important, as outlined in this blog. My job was to port a security critical network processing agent into Rust to eliminate the memory safety bugs that had plagued it.
