Tag: Visual Studio

Microsoft: C++ Developer Guidance for Speculative Execution Side Channels

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C++ Developer Guidance for Speculative Execution Side Channels
05/03/2018
Matt Miller Colin Robertson Mike B

This article contains guidance for developers to assist with identifying and mitigating speculative execution side channel hardware vulnerabilities in C++ software. These vulnerabilities can disclose sensitive information across trust boundaries and can affect software that runs on processors that support speculative, out-of-order execution of instructions. This class of vulnerabilities was first described in January, 2018 and additional background and guidance can be found in Microsoft’s security advisory. The guidance provided by this article is related to the class of vulnerabilities represented by CVE-2017-5753, also known as Spectre variant 1. This hardware vulnerability class is related to side channels that can arise due to speculative execution that occurs as a result of a conditional branch misprediction. The Visual C++ compiler in Visual Studio 2017 (starting with version 15.5.5) includes support for the /Qspectre switch provides a compile-time mitigation for a limited set of potentially vulnerable coding patterns related to CVE-2017-5753. The documentation for the /Qspectre flag provides more information on its effects and usage.[…]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/security/developer-guidance-speculative-execution

[…]An accessible introduction to speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities can be found in the presentation titled The Case of Spectre and Meltdown by one of the research teams that discovered these issues.[…]

 

Pete Batard adds ARM support for VS2017 to Tianocore

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Pete Batard  is adding Visual Studio for ARM support to the Tianocore UEFI dev toolchain:

This is a v2 of the previous patch, that takes into account the alignment of suppressed level 4 warnings between IA32, X64 and ARM, and that also removes compiler options that weren’t actually needed. The following series adds ARM compilation support for the VS2017 toolchain. With these patches, VS2017 toolchain users should be able to compile regular UEFI ARM applications using EDK2. Note that, unlike ARM64 support, ARM support does not require a specific update of Visual Studio 2017, as the ARM toolchain has been available from the very first release. We tested compiling and running the full UEFI Shell with this series, as well as a small set of applications and drivers, and found no issues. With an additional patch [1], it is also possible to use this proposal to compile a complete QEMU ARM firmware. As the patch shows, the changes that need to be applied to the EDK2 sources to achieve this are actually very minimal. However, the generated firmware does not currently boot, possibly because of the following warnings being generated by the MS compiler[…[]At this stage, since the goal of this series is to allow users to compile regular ARM UEFI applications using the VS2017 toolchain, I have non plans to spend more time on the QEMU firmware issues, especially as I suspect that reducing the firmware size back to 2 MB may not be achievable without Microsoft altering their compiler. I am however hopeful that ARM specialists can take this matter over eventually…

[1] https://github.com/pbatard/edk2/commit/c4ce41094a46f4f3dc7ccc64a90604813f037b13

More info:
http://pete.akeo.ie/2017/05/compiling-desktop-arm-applications-with.html
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/edk2-devel
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-ide/suggestions/18614308-add-arm-support-back
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/10/23/arm-gcc-cross-compilation-in-visual-studio/
https://github.com/microsoft/vslinux/issues
https://github.com/Microsoft/VSLinux/issues/110

See-also:
http://shadetail.com/blog/using-visual-studio-code-for-arm-development-introduction/

Note that Pete is not from the Microsoft Visual Studio team, he’s just doing their work for them… I hope the VS team gives Pete a complementary subscription to their commercial product! [Strange, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Microsoft add suppport for their own tools to Tianocore, it is always an external vendor that does Microsoft’s work…]

 

VBoxHardenedLoader

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[…]What we will target:
– DMI Information;
– IDE/AHCI devices (harddisks, cd-rom’s);
– ACPI OEM Information;
– Ethernet Adapter MAC address;
– PXE Boot data;
– ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table);
– ACPI SSDT (Secondary System Descriptor Table);
– VGA Video BIOS data;
– BIOS data;
– VM splashscreen (optional, just for nice looking).
[…]

https://github.com/hfiref0x/VBoxHardenedLoader

http://www.kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3478

It requires Visual Studio and only targets Microsoft Windows. No Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X support. 😦

Somewhat related, there are also these 2 projects:

https://firmwaresecurity.com/2016/02/07/uefi-virtualbox-tutorial/

https://firmwaresecurity.com/2015/12/24/virtualbox-hardened-loader/

Windows UEFI development course

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WinInsider — probably via Alex Ionescu — has a UEFI development course available.  Alex is the author of VisualUEFI, which hides the non-Visual Studio’isms of EDK-II development. Alex, along with others at Wininternals, is also one of the current authors of the “Windows Internals”  book from Microsoft Press, now a 2-volume 6th edition set, originally called “Inside Windows NT”, written by Helen Custer.

Windows UEFI Development (3 Days or 5 Days)

In this course, one can expect to learn the internals of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface inside and out, from the high-level concepts and overview of its functionality, down to the low-level development of actual UEFI applications, drivers, and services. The seminar will go over the history of UEFI’s development, from its original “Intel Boot Initiative” days to today’s SecureBoot facilities (and controversies), discuss the core UEFI data structures that form the basis of the environment, describe the different internal boot phases of the UEFI Runtime, and go in detail over the main UEFI protocols and their semantics. The course will also cover how UEFI leverages several Microsoft technologies, such as Authenticode and the Portable Executable (PE) format. Finishing off the lecture section will be a deep dive on how Windows 8 and later take advantage of UEFI to support booting off GPT disks, implementing SecureBoot, and speeding up the boot experience. Windows user-mode and kernel-mode APIs that interact with UEFI, as well as internal kernel data structures and capabilities in the UEFI HAL will also be shown off. Alongside the lecture period, attendees will get their hands dirty with bare-to-the-metal UEFI development using Visual Studio, as well as learning how to setup the UEFI SDK (EDK) to work alongside Microsoft’s development tools. Participants will get the chance to build their own UEFI applications, drivers, and runtime services, as well as learn how to debug and test their work in the OVMF environment alongside QEMU, without requiring actual UEFI hardware. The course will also show how to develop and build SecureBoot-compatible binaries. Finally, attendees will discover the Windows-specific Boot Application Runtime Environment, how to build compatible applications, and how to leverage the environment from both a UEFI and PCAT perspective. Attendees will then write both offensive and defensive UEFI code that hooks and/or protects the Windows Boot Loader.

UEFI Course Outline:
* Introduction to UEFI
* UEFI Architecture
* UEFI Protocols & Services
* Windows and UEFI
* Windows Boot Application Environment
* Windows Boot Loader Internals
* EDK and Visual Studio Development
* Windows & UEFI Interfacing

Topics:
* UEFI Protocols: UEFI Device Handles, UEFI Text and Graphics, UEFI Local and Remote I/O, UEFI USB & PCI, UEFI File System, Custom Protocols
* UEFI Services: UEFI Boot Services & Runtime Services, UEFI System Table, ACPI & UEFI, Custom Services
* UEFI Architecture: Measured Boot & Secure Boot, UEFI Stages & Layers (SEC, PEI, DXE), GPT Partitioning, Types of UEFI Binaries
* Windows & UEFI: Calling UEFI Services, Accessing UEFI Variables, Windows Boot Library and UEFI, BCD and UEFI, HAL and UEFI
* Windows Boot Environment: PCAT and UEFI Portability, Core Data Structures, Entrypoint and Callbacks,  Building a Windows Boot Application
* Windows Boot Loader: Boot Stages, Boot Loader Functionality, Security Services (BitLocker and more), Boot Structures, Handoff to Kernel
* UEFI Development: Obtaining and Installing the EDK, Setting up Visual Studio with the EDK, EDK Hello World, Interfacing with EDK Libraries, Obtaining and Installing OVMF
* Offensive UEFI: Hooking UEFI Services and Protocols, Windows Boot Environment Hooks, Persistence with UEFI
* Defensive UEFI: Checking for Boot Loader Integrity, Detecting UEFI Hooks and Bootkits

http://www.windows-internals.com/?page_id=1673

http://www.alex-ionescu.com/

Intel MPX support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2015

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From the Microsoft Visual Studio blog, there’s a new post mentioning that VS2015.update1 has a new “Experimental” support of Microsoft MPX (Memory Protection Extensions).

This post is about Intel® Memory Protection Extensions (Intel MPX) support in Microsoft Visual Studio* 2015; content provided by Gautham Beeraka, George Kuan, and Juan Rodriguez from Intel Corporation. Update 1 for Visual Studio 2015 was announced on November 30, 2015. This update includes experimental compiler and debugger support for Intel MPX.  Intel MPX can check all pointer reads and writes to ensure they remain within their declared memory bounds.  This technology can detect buffer overflows and stop program execution at runtime, averting possible system compromises. It enables C/C++ code to make use of the new MPX instruction set and registers introduced in the 6th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors (“MPX-enabled platform”). The Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler* and linker can now generate checks automatically, a capability enabled by specifying a command line option. This blog explains how you can use automatic MPX code generation and debug MPX-enabled binaries.  For more details on Intel MPX, please see the Intel MPX Technology web page. […]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2016/01/20/visual-studio-2015-update-1-new-experimental-feature-mpx.aspx

Debugging Tools for Windows 10

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It looks like Microsoft has updated Windbg for Windows 10, one of the new features is support of Visual Studio’s NatVis expression model:

 dx (Display NatVis Expression) – Describes the new dx debugger command, which displays object information using the NatVis extension model and LINQ support.
New commands that work with the NatVis visualization files in the debugger environment.

    .nvlist (NatVis List)
    .nvload (NatVis Load)
    .nvunload (NatVis Unload)
    .nvunloadall (NatVis Unload All)

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/mt219728%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Bromium Labs on Microsoft Control Flow Guard

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Rafal Wojtczuk has a new entry on the Bromium Labs blog, on Microsoft’s Control Flow Guard security feature, and evading it.

http://labs.bromium.com/2015/09/28/an-interesting-detail-about-control-flow-guard/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/12/08/visual-studio-2015-preview-work-in-progress-security-feature.aspx

new tool: Visual UEFI for Windows

~ hucktech ~ 1 Comment

Alex Ionescu just created a new project to help with Visual Studio / EDK-II integration.

https://github.com/ionescu007/VisualUefi

Excerpting from it’s readme, VisualUEFI is 3 things:

1) a Solution and set of Visual Studio 2015 Project Files to allow building the official EDK-II without the use of inf files, Python and 50 other build tools, a custom dependency tracker and build system, and twenty other custom pieces of code. The EDK-II is present as a submodule, directly from the official TianoCore Tree, and no changes are done to it.
2) a Solution and couple of Visual Studio 2015 Project Files to show two UEFI sample components: A UEFI Application, and a UEFI Boot Driver. The code is 100% EDK-II compatible, but built with VisualUEFI instead.
3) a working copy of QEMU64 2.3 for Windows, with a fairly recent UEFI 2.5 OVMF Secure Boot ROM. These will updated on an ongoing basis as needed. This is integrated with the Visual Studio 2015 Sample Solution so that pressing F5 will spin up the instance for testing.

You should be able to open the EDK-II.SLN file and build without any issues in Visual Studio 2015. WDK or other 3rd party installations are not needed. Once the EDK-II libraries are built, you should be able to open the SAMPLES.SLN file and build the two samples, which will create UefiApplication.efi and UefiDriver.efi.

You can press F5 (Run/Debug) from within the Sample Solution, which should spin up the QEMU instance with 512MB of ram, and your release directory as a virtual file system accessible through “fs0:”. You can then try loading the driver with “Load fs0:\UefiDriver.efi”. You can verify its presence by using the Drivers or DevTree commands.

Visual UEFI looks like a nice improvement to Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE. Thanks, Alex!

(This is the kind of thing I kept expecting the UEFI Forum to release, as an Eclipse plugin, like Yocto and some related projects have done.)