USING EMET TO DEFEND AGAINST TARGETED ATTACKS PRESENTED BY ROBERT HENSING – SENIOR CONSULTANT – MICROSOFT CORPORATION MICHAEL MATTES – SENIOR CONSULTANT – MICROSOFT CORPORATION

WHO WE ARE Robert Hensing 15 year Microsoft employee TWC alum 5 year tour in MSRC Engineering – Defense team Currently Developer Consultant in National Security Group practice Michael Mattes XX year Microsoft employee Infrastructure consultant in NSG etc.

TRUSTWORTHY COMPUTING - SECURITY CENTERS Protecting Microsoft customers throughout the entire life cycle (in development, deployment and operations) Microsoft Security Engineering Center (MSEC) Security Assurance Security Science SDLSDL Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) Release Product Life Cycle Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) (MSRC) Ecosystem Strategy MSRC Ops MSRC Engineering Conception

Result: Attackers only have to find one vulnerability, and they get to use it for a really long time. THE SOFTWARE VULNERABILITY ASYMMETRY PROBLEM Defender must fix all vulnerabilities in all software – attacker wins by finding and exploiting just one vulnerability Threats change over time – state-of-the-art in vulnerability finding and attack techniques changes over time Patch deployment takes time – vendor must offset risks to stability & compatibility, customer waits for servicing cycle

EXPLOIT ECONOMICS 5 Gains per use X Opportunities to use Cost to acquire vulnerability + Cost to weaponize Attacker Return - =

Desired Result: Usable attacks will be rare and require significant engineering; working exploits will become scarce and valuable EXPLOIT ECONOMICS We can decrease Attacker Return if we are able to… Increase attacker investment required to find usable vulnerabilities Remove entire classes of vulnerabilities where possible Focus on automation to scale human efforts Increase attacker investment required to write reliable exploits Build mitigations that add brittleness Make exploits impossible to write completely reliably Decrease attacker’s opportunity to recover their investment Shrink window of vulnerability Fewer opportunities via artificial diversity Enable rapid detection & suppression of exploit usage

INCREASE ATTACKER INVESTMENT REQUIRED TO FIND VULNERABILITIES Exploit Economics Strategy – Step 1 7

EMBEDDING SECURITY INTO SOFTWARE AND CULTURE Tactics for Vulnerability Reduction Remove entire classes of vulnerabilities Security Tooling Additional product features Remove all currently findable vulnerabilities Complete automation of tooling SDL tools, Threat Modeling tool Fuzzing toolsets + ways to streamline & improve triage Tool overlays to increase signal-to-noise and focus attention on the right code Verification & enforcement Audit individual tool usage via process tools Process tools required for SDL signoff - policy enforcement Ongoing Process Improvements

PREVENT RELIABLE EXPLOITATION OF VULNERABILITIES Exploit Economics Strategy – Step 2

EMBEDDING SECURITY INTO SOFTWARE AND CULTURE Tactics to Frustrate Exploits Reduce the surface we have to defend Attack surface reduction Design additional product mitigations Make remaining vulnerabilities difficult or impossible to exploit Build mitigations that add exploit brittleness Ongoing Process Improvements

DIGITAL COUNTERMEASURES Improve system survivability against exploitation of unknown vulnerabilities Three goals: Increase attacker requirements – e.g. must be authenticated, local subnet only Deterrent – no economically reliable exploit exists Mitigation – Break 100% reliable universal exploits Often must be combined together Even when successful, the result is still impactful to the user 11

MITIGATION APPROACHES Utilize secrets such that guessing impairs exploit reliability /GS: Protect stack buffers by checking random cookies placed between them and control structures Function Pointer Encoding 12 Utilize Knowledge Deficits Artificial Diversity Enforce Invariants ASLR: Address Space Layout Randomization Data Execute Protection (DEP) Heap & pool metadata checks SafeSEH / SEH Overwrite Protection (SEHOP)

MEMORY SAFETY MITIGATIONS ROADMAP 13 Stack Heap / Pool Executable Code /GS 1.0 /GS 1.1 Heap 1.0 DEP ASLRDEP IE /GS /NXCOMPAT Heap 2.0HeapTerm EH4SEHOP/GS 3.0 DEP+ATL Safe Unlinking 2009 DEP O SEHOP IE9

MS – INTERNET EXPLORER CVE (SAME ID) 0-day vulnerability being used in limited targeted attacks prior to bulletin release. Vulnerability about as bad as it gets! Remote Code Exec vulnerability in all versions of IE (at the time) and exploitable via a web page Fixed by MS us/security/bulletin/ms12-037http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/security/bulletin/ms Standard mitigations in the bulletin were Don’t open Office documents Killbit the AX control in IE

EMET VS. MS CVE (SAME ID)

CALL TO ACTION Follow the Security Research and Defense blog Evaluate and Deploy EMET v3.5 or newer Protect critical applications such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Office, Adobe Acrobat etc Monitor for EMET related events in the event log using System Center or other Enterprise monitoring software

DEPLOYMENT AND MANAGEMENT VIA GROUP POLICY