New Internet Explorer 10 memory protection features not just for Internet Explorer

After last week’s pwn2own and pwnium contests, browser security is, once more, a hot topic. The existence of flaws in browsers is nowadays taken for granted: what security researchers are most interested in is the mitigation techniques browsers use to try to render those flaws harmless. Microsoft published a recent blog post discussing some of the new mitigation techniques that will be used in Internet Explorer 10.

The post first addresses existing anti-exploitation measures already used by Internet Explorer. These are a mix of compile-time techniques—Microsoft’s compiler injects code to detect some buffer overflows, for example—and runtime techniques—such as the “Data Execution Prevention” that makes it harder to exploit buffer overflows.