This article in our series focused on Microsoft’s free security tools is on a tool called Portqry. This tool is a TCP/IP connectivity test tool, port scanner, and local port monitor. Portqry is useful for troubleshooting networking issues as well as verifying network security related configurations.
This article in our series focused on Microsoft’s free security tools is on a tool called Windows Defender Offline. Windows Defender Offline is a standalone software application that is designed to help detect malicious and other potentially unwanted software, including rootkits that try to install themselves on a PC.
As the adoption of cloud computing continues to rise, and customers demand 24/7 access to their services and data, reliability remains a challenge for cloud service providers everywhere. As I said in the recent Cloud Fundamentals video on reliability, it’s not a matter of if an outage will occur; it’s strictly a matter of when.
This article in our series focused on Microsoft’s free security tools is on the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) banned.h header file. This is an important tool for developers who are trying to minimize the number of security vulnerabilities that exist in the C or C++ code they write.
Tim Burrell and Thomas Garnier of the TwC Security Science team present the sixth and last blog installment describing more /sdl functionality in Visual Studio 2012 RC. Please note that there will be an MSDN webcast discussing the security enhancements to Visual Studio 2012 RC – a wrap-up of sorts – on June 13 at 9:00AM (PST).
Pop security quiz: What’s the most secure way to store a secret? a) Encrypt it with a strong symmetric cryptographic algorithm such as AES, using a 256-bit key. b) Encrypt it with a strong asymmetric cryptographic algorithm such as RSA, using a 4096-bit key.
Hi everyone, Shawn Hernan here. Being a security guy is incredibly rewarding because you get to look at virtually any part of a product, from kernel drivers to web services to user education to sales and servicing.
Adam Shostack here. I said recently that I wanted to talk more about what I do. The core of what I do is help Microsoft’s product teams analyze the security of their designs by threat modeling.
“You can’t test quality in.” It’s a truism coined long ago and an accepted fact of software development. Yet, for security, testing is arguably the most talked about aspect of the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). When we get security wrong, the first criticism we almost always hear is, “Didn’t you guys test this thing?
How many of you have heard “many eyes make all bugs shallow”? My guess is that many of you have and that it may have been in conjunction with an argument supporting why Linux and Open Source products have better security. For example, Red Hat publishes a document at www.redhat.com/whitepapers/services/Open_Source_Security5.
How many of you have heard of the Common Criteria ? If you’ve ever done security work with government, you probably have. If not, then possibly not. Either way, read on and I’ll give you my own view, including some of the barnacles clinging to the hull of the general program.
