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Updated September 10, 2018 The Servicing Criteria for Windows has transitioned to an official document and can be found at the link below. Microsoft thanks the members of the research community who provided feedback on the draft copy. Microsoft Security Servicing Criteria for Windows

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.

Today, we released security updates to provide additional protections against malicious attackers. As a best practice, we encourage customers to turn on automatic updates. More information about this month’s security updates can be found on the Security Update Guide. MSRC team

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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”).

Today, Microsoft is announcing the launch of a limited-time bounty program for speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities. This new class of vulnerabilities was disclosed in January 2018 and represented a major advancement in the research in this field. In recognition of that threat environment change, we are launching a bounty program to encourage research into the new class of vulnerability and the mitigations Microsoft has put in place to help mitigate this class of issues.