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, 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.
