Microsoft today yesterday that it has integrated the Return Oriented Programming (ROP) defense method submitted by Ivan Fratric, a researcher at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, into its latest Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 3.5 Technology Preview. Fratric's "ROPGuard" approach specifies a set of checks for detecting when certain functions are being called by ROP code.
The objective of the BlueHat Prize contest was to find the most innovative defense technique to fight memory-safety exploitation attacks. Fratric and two other finalists, Jared DeMott and Vasilis Pappas, were named last month as the contestants with the top three entries in the contest, which offers more than $250,000 in cash and prizes to the winners.
BlueHat is Microsoft's alternative to bug bounties, instead challenging researchers to come up with new ways to mitigate exploits rather than find new bugs. The top three contestants submitted entries to thwart attacks that leverage return-oriented programming (ROP), a method used by attackers to employ short snippets of benign code in a system for nefarious purposes. The grand prize winner, who will receive $200,000, will be named during Microsoft's Researcher Appreciation Party July 26, 2012.
Microsoft insist that Fratric may or may not be the grand-prize winner. Also in the running are DeMott, who teaches a popular application security course at security conferences, and his "/ROP" method that vets the target addresses of the return instructions to ensure they aren't malicious, and Vasilis Pappas, a Ph.D. student at Columbia University whose "kBouncer" approach detects abnormal control transfers using common hardware features.