Win a quarter-million in prizes to improve Windows security

In betanews

If the security of your system depends on users making intelligent security decisions then you're basically doomed. After all these years of experience with end users on the Internet we know that they can't be trusted to make those decisions correctly. At least not often enough.

That's why the best security technologies are the ones that happen in spite of the user. These have been a focus for Microsoft over the last 10 years and remain the last, best hope of userdom.


And that's why Microsoft launched the Blue Hat Prize this year at BlackHat. The prize will be awarded each year for advances in defensive security technology. Existing examples of these are ASLR and DEP, which stop exploits of vulnerabilities automatically.

A quick review of these technologies is in order:

DEP (Data Execution Prevention). This goes back to Windows XP SP2 I believe. Windows uses CPU features to mark data areas of the program as non-executable. Many exploits rely on generating code in data areas and executing it.

Click here to access the Blue Hat prize