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CanSecWest

MS13-037 addressing Pwn2own vulnerabilities

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

MS13-037 addresses a number of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, several of which were reported to us by the TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) program. We’ve gotten questions from customers about the specific vulnerabilities purchased by ZDI from the CanSecWest pwn2own contest. We’d like to use this blog post to provide more background on the set of vulnerabilities required for an attacker to exploit modern-day browsers and the state of fixes for those specific vulnerabilities.

MS11-018 addresses the IE8 pwn2own vulnerability

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Today Microsoft released MS11-018 addressing one of the three vulnerabilities that were used to win the Pwn2Own contest last month at CanSecWest 2011. It took three vulnerabilities to successfully compromise IE8 and meet all the requirements of the organizers. The vulnerability we are fixing today, a use-after-free which does not affect IE9, was the primary vulnerability used to gain code execution.

Hacker Olympics: a shout-out from Vancouver, BC!

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Handle: Cluster IRL: Maarten Van Horenbeeck Rank: Senior Program Manager Likes: Slicing covert channels, foraging in remote memory pools, and setting off page faults Dislikes: The crackling sound of crypto breaking, warm vodka martni Handle: Mando Picker IRL: Dustin Childs Rank: Security Program Manager Likes: Protecting customers, working with security researchers, second Tuesdays, bourbon, mandolins

Numbers, Big Numbers, at the RSA Conference 2010

Monday, March 15, 2010

Handle: Cluster IRL: Maarten Van Horenbeeck Rank: Senior Program Manager Likes: Slicing covert channels, foraging in remote memory pools, and setting off page faults Dislikes: The crackling sound of crypto breaking, warm vodka martni San Francisco has always been a somewhat odd but pleasant outpost with an appeal that attracts people from all over.

Snowpacalypse Now (I love the smell of briefings in the morning)

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Handle: Avatar IRL: Karl Hanmore Rank: Senior Security Strategist (aka Sergeant Grunt) Likes: Getting the job done, bringing the fight to the bad guys, good single malt whiskey Dislikes: Cowards, talkers not doers, red tape, humidity Handle: Mando Picker IRL: Dustin Childs Rank: Security Program Manager Likes: Protecting customers, working with security researchers, second Tuesdays, bourbon, mandolins

MS09-019 (CVE-2009-1532): The "pwn2own" vulnerability

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

IE8 behavior notes MS09-019 contains the fix for the IE8 vulnerability responsibly disclosed by Nils at the CanSecWest pwn2own competition (CVE-2009-1532). Nils exploited this vulnerability on an IE8 build that did allow .NET assemblies to load in the Internet Zone. The final, released build of IE8 does not allow .Net assemblies to load in the Internet Zone.

The History of the !exploitable Crash Analyzer

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

At the CanSecWest conference earlier this month we made our first public release of the !exploitable Crash Analyzer. While an upcoming white paper and the CanSecWest slide deck go into detail on the technology involved, we thought it might be useful to explore the history of the tool. Roots in Fuzzing The technology and research that eventually became the !

Released build of Internet Explorer 8 blocks Dowd/Sotirov ASLR+DEP .NET bypass

Monday, March 23, 2009

Last summer at BlackHat Vegas, Alexander Sotirov and Mark Dowd outlined several clever ways to bypass the Windows Vista defense-in-depth protection combination of DEP and ASLR in attacks targeting Internet Explorer. One approach they presented allowed attackers to use .NET framework DLL’s to allocate executable pages of memory at predictable locations within the iexplore.

Enhanced GS in Visual Studio 2010

Friday, March 20, 2009

In a previous post we noted some stack-based vulnerabilities, such as MS08-067, that GS was not designed to mitigate due to the degree of control available to an attacker. However, other vulnerabilities such as the ANI parsing vulnerability in MS07-017 would have been mitigated if the GS cookie protection had been applied more broadly.

CanSecWest: Caution, Community at Play

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

CanSecWest, in beautiful Vancouver BC, is one of my favorite conferences each year. It’s a cozy little security con that brings together security researchers from all parts of the security ecosystem. Like a PhNeutral or a BlueHat, one never quite knows what to expect out of a CanSecWest, but we do know that Microsoft products and engineers will play a prominent role.