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MSRC

Microsoft Security Response Center Blog

Analysis and mitigation of speculative store bypass (CVE-2018-3639)

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.

BlueHat v18 Announced & Call for Papers Opens

Friday, May 04, 2018

We are back! Microsoft is excited to announce the next installment of the BlueHat Security Conference – BlueHat v18. We will be holding the event at Microsoft’s headquarter campus September 25-27, 2018. This year we are adding the option for workshops and networking on the first day prior to the content beginning.

Hyper-V Debugging Symbols Are Publicly Available

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).

Recognizing Q3 Top 5 Bounty Hunters

Friday, April 20, 2018

Throughout the year, security researchers submit some amazing work to us under the Microsoft Bug Bounty program. Starting this quarter, we want to give a shout out to and acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the following individuals and companies who have contributed to securing Microsoft’s products and services over our third quarter (January-March 2018).

April 2018 security update release

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. By default, Windows 10 receives these updates automatically, and for customers running previous versions, we recommend they turn on automatic updates as a best practice. More information about this month’s security updates can be found in the Security Update Guide.

Triaging a DLL planting vulnerability

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.

KVA Shadow: Mitigating Meltdown on Windows

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”).

Mitigating speculative execution side channel hardware vulnerabilities

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.