BlueHat IL 2023 - David Weston - Default Security
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as the primary source for Microsoft's Rust adoption and its reasoning on TPM and security requirements.
What it is
David Weston's BlueHat IL 2023 talk traces the evolution of Windows security and previews Windows 11 and hardware advances. It ends with upcoming changes such as Rust in the kernel and fonts, signed binaries and adminless Windows.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends senectus1 · 2023-04 · on “Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows library code in memory-safe Rust”
[this video] This is the announcement video. its about an hour long but much of it is very interesting. "Adminless windows" sounds very interesting.
Recommends nindalf · 2023-04 · on “Microsoft is to enable Rust use for Windows 11 kernel”
Link to the talk - [this video] (timestamped to the part about Rust) The speaker covers a bunch of areas and the final part of the talk (around 10 minutes) is about Microsoft introducing Rust in some self-contained areas in Windows. Some highlights: - Their focus is on "killing bug classes". More context in this post by Microsoft Research from 2019 - A proactive approach to more secure code. - They want to do this with memory safe languages, CPU architectural changes and safer language subsets. This talk focussed on memory safe languages, specifically Rust. - First area they've introduced Rust in - a cross platform rewrite of a font parser called DWriteCore. The team reported that parsing was "in
Recommends Hawxy · 2023-04 · on “Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices”
> just to make existing CPUs obsolete and keep Intel in business. Bizarre take. It's not random, it's specifically CPUs that support modern hardware security mitigations. There's a pretty great talk from Bluehat a few days ago that goes into why Microsoft is doing this: [this video]
Recommends Hawxy · 2025-02 · on “Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs”
> Security There's a pretty interesting video from 2023 that goes through much of Microsoft's thoughts around Windows security. It flew under the radar unfortunately: [this video]
Cites mustache_kimono · 2023-04 · on “BlueHat IL 2023: Microsoft rewriting core Windows libraries in Rust”
Rust discussion starts at: [this video] Highlights: * 2 projects: dwrite and Win32k * 2 devs, 6 months to rewrite 152KLOC C++ to 90KLOC Rust re dwrite * Performance increases of 5-15% re dwrite * Only about 10% of Win32k code is unsafe * No perf regressions re Win32k * Syscall in the Windows kernel now written in Rust
Cites pohl · 2023-04 · on “Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows library code in memory-safe Rust”
Listen to them talking about it. This isn’t the sound of rogue group of developers focused on creating job security for themselves [this video]
Cites pjmlp · 2023-04 · on “Microsoft is to enable Rust use for Windows 11 kernel”
Which is why if you watch the talk where this was announced, Windows is in the process of requiring signed binaries, and two admin levels like on macOS. [this video]
Cites mustache_kimono · 2023-04 · on “Microsoft is to enable Rust use for Windows 11 kernel”
> BlueHat IL 2023: Microsoft rewriting core Windows libraries in Rust (youtube.com) 89 points by mustache_kimono 23 hours ago | past | 45 comments The primary source material is this talk: [this video]