![]() ![]() ReactOS aims the kernel of Windows NT to be compatible with, making it possible for programs and drivers designed for Windows NT and its successors such as Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 7 can run. To get a taste of what will be on offer, click here to hear Patrick's full interview with Alex Ionescu.ReactOS is a free operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows applications with the goal to complete binary compatibility for Microsoft Windows. Patrick Gray's Risky Business podcast will bring Reg readers special coverage of the Ruxcon Breakpoint conference. The difference today is exploits affecting the current generation of Windows are considered newsworthy. Windows 7 users, for example, were not immune to last month's Internet Explorer bug, or this flaw in Oracle's Java software. Regardless of all the mitigations, disastrous exploits affecting Windows 7 still surface from time to time, and that will no doubt continue with Windows 8. they should now feel a lot safer if they're using Windows 8 I think." "A well versed person who understands the risks of browsing the Internet and doesn't just run random stuff. That takes more than mitigations to prevent," he says. they get a flash banner ad that tells them 'download this and run it' and they just go ahead and download and run it. "Novice users, the way they get attacked is not through advanced exploits. Some clever hardware crypto features - Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) - will also allow users' hardware to ensure the Windows kernel hasn't been tampered with before it's loaded into memory.Īt a stretch it's possible the biggest security risk to users in a Windows 8 will be their own behaviour and not the drive-by download attacks of the last three to four years, Ionescu says. what ELAM does is say 'let's have a special category of drivers that we can guarantee loads before any other Windows driver'." "They'll load their drivers before their AV driver comes up and by this time the system is already rootkitted, it's already owned. There's also support for Early Launch Anti-Malware (ELAM) drivers. "Every (Metro) application runs kind of in its own virtual account, its own files, its own registry settings, it's own named objects and it's isolated from all the other objects, files and registry keys that other applications might have ," he says. Applications designed in the Windows 8 Metro language will be sandboxed in similar ways to mobile applications on Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating system. There are further improvements to usermode security, as well, Ionescu says. "With Windows 8 they've definitely raised the bar and added a laundry list of mitigations and protections and additional security around things that make it honestly a lot harder," he says. "No one actually found a way to exploit that bug and get code execution out of it, and I think Windows 8 will make those kinds of things even harder." ![]() "We had 90 people in an IRC channel, some of the best exploit writers, and the most we got was a denial of service attack," he says. Ionescu cites the failure of highly-skilled exploit writers to successfully trigger a known, critical vulnerability in Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) on the Windows 7 operating system this August as a sign of real progress. The deluge, today, looks more like a trickle. All of a sudden, exploiting bugs on current-generation Windows became suddenly significantly harder and the number of usable exploits dropped off. Next came Vista with its much-loathed UAC feature and some basic memory mitigations like DEP and ASLR, with those features tweaked and carried over into Windows 7. It introduced a basic firewall to the operating system and pestered users into installing anti-virus software and opting for automatic OS updates. ![]() Microsoft's efforts started taking shape around 2004, when Service Pack 2 for Windows XP was released. ![]()
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