Location

Abstract

Over the past 5 years, Microsoft has conducted extensive and detailed security reviews and upgrades of its very large code bases. We’ve learnt a lot about how to build safer code, and in Visual C++ 8.0, we’re applying that to the Visual C++ Libraries to help protect against classic security problems (such as buffer overruns). The Standard C Library includes many venerable functions with security problems. Visual C++ 8.0 includes a full revamp of this library to help programmers build safer code with minimal source changes. The Standard C++ library provides a clean and simple abstraction for algorithms, iterators and containers that provides much better protection than the traditional C library. We extended our implementation of the Standard C++ Libraries to try to make them apply, by default, the lessons we’ve learnt from reviewing our code. The result is a much safer implementation of the Standard Libraries with only a small amount of reduced functionality. This talk describes the changes made and their impact on application code, as well as some of the internals of the implementation.

Bio

Martyn Lovell is the Development Lead on the Visual C++ Libraries Team, which is responsible for the C and C++ runtime libraries, MFC, ATL, STL/CLR and other libraries supporting managed code development in C++. His recent focus has been security in the standard libraries, and support for mixing managed and native code in a single program. As a long-standing member of the developer tools division, he has worked on a broad range of features. These include architecture, design and implementation for: the extensibility of the Visual Studio Shell; source control and Visual SourceSafe; source control integration and other team development features; the Visual Studio Analyzer infrastructure and user interface; the common development shell; web development; and the Visual Studio user interface. He is a frequent speaker at TechEd and other conferences, and a regular contributor to online communities.

Click here to download the slides from the presentation