All the Guards–Part 9

This article is a part of a series. The previous article can be found here:

All the Guards – Part 8 DMA Guard

In this article I’m going to focus on the next component, which is:

Control Flow Guard

Control Flow Guard (CFG) is a highly-optimized platform security feature that was created to combat memory corruption vulnerabilities. By placing tight restrictions on where an application can execute code from, it makes it much harder for exploits to execute arbitrary code through vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows.

An administrator or user cannot configure Control Flow Guard. It is something that a developer must do inside their code. It is however something they can take advantage of in Windows 10:

Control Flow Guard

Of course, browsers are a key entry point for attacks, so Microsoft Edge, IE, and other Windows features take full advantage of CFG.

That bring us to the end of all the ‘Guards’ that I can find out there from Microsoft. I’ll provide a summary of all of this information in the final part of the series::

Summary of all the Guards