A view of the current landscape
Criminal attacks continue to evolve and malware has become their standard weapon against anyone who uses the Internet—on traditional form-factor devices, as well as on mobile devices like tablets and phones. Malware targets all operating systems and browsers, and in recent years, criminal attacks against applications have increased substantially.
Criminals also use social engineering to trick you into performing actions that put you at risk. An increasingly common social engineering strategy uses online advertising campaigns to lure you to a site that installs malware on your computer.
An economy has developed around building reliable vulnerability exploits, which criminals buy to help distribute their malware. Criminals make money from their malware, so they invest in ways to keep it alive such as producing a higher quantity of malware, updating it more frequently—e.g. multiples times each day—and increasing its size and complexity. Some malware is as complex as commercial applications.
Secure by design
We use the
Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) to build Windows with the best security design, development and testing practices available. Some highlights include:
- Threat modeling and security design reviews. During the design process we consider how criminals might seek to attack features and scenarios, and incorporate this analysis into our designs.
- Writing secure code. Training and code quality tools help to prevent common coding issues from entering the Windows source code.
- Penetration testing. Security engineers take an attacker’s perspective when reviewing a completed set of features that make up a scenario.
- Security code reviews. Security engineers provide additional security-oriented code reviews for highly sensitive components.
- Security tools. Tools continuously updated with the latest state of the art in finding and exploiting software provide a scalable solution to improve existing code.
Making it harder to create an exploit on Windows 8
With Windows XP SP2, we began creating defenses called mitigations that make it difficult to develop reliable exploits for security vulnerabilities. Each subsequent version of Windows has continued to expand and improve on these mitigations, because a single mitigation feature can break an entire class of exploits. Windows 8 includes mitigation enhancements that further reduce the likelihood of common attacks. Some of these improvements include:
- Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR). ASLR was first introduced in Windows Vista and works by randomly shuffling the location of most code and data in memory to block assumptions that the code and data are at same address on all PCs. In Windows 8, we extended ASLR’s protection to more parts of Windows and introduced enhancements such as increased randomization that will break many known techniques for circumventing ASLR.
- Windows kernel. In Windows 8, we bring many of the mitigations to the Windows kernel that previously only applied to user-mode applications. These will help improve protection against some of the most common type of threats. For example, we now prevent user-mode processes from allocating the low 64K of process memory, which prevents a whole class of kernel-mode NULL dereference vulnerabilities from being exploited. We also added integrity checks to the kernel pool memory allocator to mitigate kernel pool corruption attacks.
- Windows heap. Applications get dynamically allocated memory from the Windows user-mode heap. Major redesign of the Windows 8 heap adds significant protection in the form of new integrity checks to help defend against many exploit techniques. In addition, the Windows heap now randomizes the order of allocations so that exploits cannot depend on the predictable placement of objects—the same principle that makes ASLR successful. We also added guard pages to certain types of heap allocations, which helps prevent exploits that rely on overrunning the heap.
- Internet Explorer. “Use-after-free” vulnerabilities represented nearly 75% of the vulnerabilities reported in Internet Explorer over the last two years. For Windows 8, we implemented guards in Internet Explorer to prevent an attacker from crafting an invalid virtual function table, making these attacks more difficult. Internet Explorer will also take full advantage of the ASLR improvements provided by Windows 8.
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Further ASLR support is wonderful for example.
