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On the effectiveness of DEP and ASLR

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Our Security Research and Defense team published a blog post, which is really interesting to read to understand how to protect Windows Vista and Windows 7: On the effectiveness of DEP and ASLR.

There is a lot of information on how both raise the bar for attackers. These are the key take away:

    • DEP and ASLR are designed to increase an attacker's exploit development costs and decrease their return on investment.
    • The combination of DEP and ASLR is very effective at breaking the types of exploits we see in the wild today, but there are circumstances where they can both be bypassed.
    • Exploits targeting Microsoft and third party vulnerabilities have been created that are capable of bypassing DEP and ASLR in the context of browsers and third party applications.
    • We are currently not aware of any remote exploits that are capable of bypassing DEP and ASLR in the context of in-box Windows services and various other application domains.
    • Knowledge of potential bypass techniques directly informs our future work to improve the robustness and resiliency of DEP, ASLR, and our other mitigation technologies.

Roger