msrc-blog

Microsoft is updating the Certificate Trust List (CTL) for all supported releases of Microsoft Windows to remove the trust of a mis-issued third-party digital certificate, which could be used to spoof content and perform phishing or man-in-the-middle attacks against web properties. With this action, customers will be automatically be protected against this issue.

This week, starting Thursday, we’ll be hosting our 13th edition of BlueHat. I’m always so impressed with the level of knowledge we attract to each BlueHat, and while the event is invite-only, we’ll be sharing glimpses into the event via this blog and the hashtag #BlueHat. For each of the past six years I have had the honor to work among some of the most talented engineers I have ever met, here at Microsoft.

Today we’re providing advance notification for the release of 11 bulletins, five Critical and six Important, for December 2013. The Critical updates address vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Windows, Microsoft Exchange and GDI+. The Critical update for GDI+ fully addresses the publicly disclosed issue described in Security Advisory 2896666. This release won’t include an update for the issue described in Security Advisory 2914486.

Today we released Security Advisory 2914486 regarding a local elevation of privilege (EoP) issue that affects customers using Microsoft Windows XP and Server 2003. Windows Vista and later are not affected by this local EoP issue. A member of the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) found this issue being used on systems compromised by a third-party remote code execution vulnerability.

As the proliferation of devices continues to capture the imagination of consumers, and has ignited what is referred to as bring your own device (BYOD) revolution, many IT departments across the globe are now facing increased security considerations. While organizations encourage BYOD for cost savings and productivity, it is also important to have robust security policies supporting BYOD.

Today we’re publishing the November 2013 Security Bulletin Webcast Questions & Answers page. The majority of questions focused on the ActiveX Kill Bits bulletin (MS13-090) and the advisories. We also answered a few general questions that were not specific to any of this month’s updates, but that may be of interest.

In light of recent research into practical attacks on biases in the RC4 stream cipher, Microsoft is recommending that customers enable TLS1.2 in their services and take steps to retire and deprecate RC4 as used in their TLS implementations. Microsoft recommends TLS1.2 with AES-GCM as a more secure alternative which will provide similar performance.

Microsoft is recommending that customers and CA’s stop using SHA-1 for cryptographic applications, including use in SSL/TLS and code signing. Microsoft Security Advisory 2880823 has been released along with the policy announcement that Microsoft will stop recognizing the validity of SHA-1 based certificates after 2016. Background Secure Hashing Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) is a message digest algorithm published in 1995 as part of NIST’s Secure Hash Standard.

If you haven’t had a chance to see the movie Gravity, I highly recommend you take the time to check it out. The plot moves a bit slowly at times, but director Alfonso Cuaron’s work portrayal of zero gravity is worth the ticket price alone. Add in stellar acting and you end up with an epic movie that really makes you miss the shuttle program.

Over the weekend we became aware of an active attack relying on an unknown remote code execution vulnerability of a legacy ActiveX component used by Internet Explorer. We are releasing this blog to confirm one more time that the code execution vulnerability will be fixed in today’s UpdateTuesday release and to clarify some details about the second vulnerability reported.