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MSRC

GS

New vulnerability in IIS5 and IIS6

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

This afternoon, the MSRC posted a security advisory describing a newly-disclosed vulnerability in the IIS FTP service that could potentially grant remote code execution to untrusted users. You can find the advisory here. Vulnerability summary The vulnerability is a stack overflow in the FTP service when listing a long, specially-crafted directory name.

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.

GS cookie protection – effectiveness and limitations

Monday, March 16, 2009

The Microsoft C/C++ compiler supports the GS switch which aims to detect stack buffer overruns at runtime and terminate the process, thus in most cases preventing an attacker from gaining control of the vulnerable machine. This post will not go into detail about how GS works, so it may be helpful to refer to these MSDN articles for an overview and loads of detail on how GS works and what a GS cookie is.