Microsoft Israel R&D Center
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2023–2025
54:35 · 47K views · Apr 19, 2023
David Weston's BlueHat IL 2023 talk traces the evolution of Windows security and previews Windows 11 and hardware advances. It ends with upcoming changes such as Rust in the kernel and fonts, signed binaries and adminless Windows.
HN uses it as the primary source for Microsoft's Rust adoption and its reasoning on TPM and security requirements.
12 comments from Hacker News
Link to the talk - this video (timestamped to the part about Rust) The speaker covers a bunch of areas and the final part of the talk (around 10 minutes) is about Microsoft introducing Rust in some self-contained areas in Windows. Some highlights: - Their focus is on "killing bug classes". More context in this post by Microsoft Research from 2019 - A proactive approach to more secure code. - They want to do this with memory safe languages, CPU architectural changes and safer language subsets. This talk focussed on memory safe languages, specifically Rust. - First area they've introduced Rust in - a cross platform rewrite of a font parser called DWriteCore. The team reported that parsing was "incredibly easy". Font shaping performance increased by 5-15% compared to the C++ version. - It took about 2 devs working for half a year to complete this. The speaker says this is pretty good value for an area that is notorious for security bugs. - Second area is the REGION data type in Win32k GDI. Currently in consumer Windows, disabled by feature flag. Will be enabled in insider builds soon. Performance has been good, some small wins for the Rust version. - There is now a Windows SysCall implemented in completed safe Rust. TLDR - Rust is inside the Windows Kernel, will be enabled widely soon.
> just to make existing CPUs obsolete and keep Intel in business. Bizarre take. It's not random, it's specifically CPUs that support modern hardware security mitigations. There's a pretty great talk from Bluehat a few days ago that goes into why Microsoft is doing this: this video
> Security There's a pretty interesting video from 2023 that goes through much of Microsoft's thoughts around Windows security. It flew under the radar unfortunately: this video
this video This is the announcement video. its about an hour long but much of it is very interesting. "Adminless windows" sounds very interesting.
David Weston was very involved in the TPM decision, and spoke about it here: this video After msft's experiences with Win10, they decided Windows wouldn't become more secure unless they enabled features by default. And the majority of high-impact features depend on a TPM. I'd argue that home users do need these features in the current security environment. TPMs have been required in new devices since 2016, so people are more likely to have thrown out incompatible devices already (CPU/RAM if not disk)