Whenever you improve your security fence, the dedicated intruder will find another way in. This has already happened to the latest release of Microsoft's anti-hacking toolkit, thereby defeating the ROPGuard protection that won a $50,000 prize.

Microsoft's BlueHat Prize for defenses against attacks on memory vulnerabilities was organized in conjunction with the annual BlackHat conference. The three prize winners all suggested solutions to counter ROP attacks and even before the prizes had been presented one of these had been put to work in a free tool that Microsoft makes available to sys admins.

Microsoft's General Manager for Trustworthy Computing Security, Matt Thomlinson, announced the latest version of its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET 5.3) on July 25 stating:

I’m excited to announce that we’ve already been able to incorporate one of these winning technologies into our free Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 3.5 technology preview. The new Tech Preview of EMET offers four new checks based on Ivan Fratric’s ROP exploit mitigation to help prevent attacks utilizing ROP techniques.

It took barely two weeks before a security researcher announced on his new REP RET blog that he had bypassed these new ROP Mitigations. Here is the You Tube video that demonstrate the exploit:

More details, including the asm code and the Kernelbase method used for a second exploit, can be found via the blog post.

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