At some point recently (“recently” being defined as “in the last year or so”) the WDK started whining at me with the following warning: It insists that I should specify PnPLockdown=1 in my INF. What IS this warning, does it matter, and do you really want to do what it advises? Here’s the scoop. What […]
Using WinDbg Over KDNet on QEMU-KVM
We spent several months working on a very intensive (and very interesting) project that required a writing a driver that was specifically intended to run on a Windows system running under QEMU-KVM hosted on a Linux system (specifically, RHEL 8). I’ll spare you all the gory details about why we had to actually dev and […]
Lost Cause: No Driver Updates Allowed, Except for Win 10
For months, the team here at OSR has been actively working with folks at Microsoft to find a solution to allow drivers on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 systems, including Server 2012 R2, to be updated. This issue was first reported by us back in October 2020. Several MSFT Program Managers (PMs) have […]
Mitigating the $I30:$Bitmap NTFS Bug
Update 1/26 Our sources at Microsoft provided us the following info: Microsoft is aware of a recent research blog post discussing a bug that could appear to lead to possible NTFS corruption. We have investigated this issue and confirmed that NTFS corruption does not result. When the symptom appears, a flag is set to […]
Mitigations and Best Practices for ExAllocatePoolZero Security Vulnerabilities
tl;dr The Windows V2004 WDK/EWDK had a serious security vulnerability. It has been updated to mitigate that vulnerability, and you should update all of your machines that have the WDK/EWDK installed. However, updating the WDK/EWDK might not be enough in all circumstances. There are driver code-level mitigations that you should implement to ensure security regardless […]
Making SDV Work with VS 2019 and WDK 2004
My article in the latest issue of The NT Insider on static analysis tools for driver developers included the following off-hand comment: We’re not going to discuss SDV in this article because (a) it provides a very different type of analysis from that provided by Code Analysis and Clang-Tidy, and (b) nobody at OSR has […]
Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8
Microsoft has announced that it is ending the ability to cross-sign drivers, effective 1 July 2021. This will effectively make it impossible to release new or updated drivers for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 systems, including Server 2012 R2. This is not an exaggeration. The only option that will remain available to devs […]
Bug in New Function ExAllocatePoolZero Results in Security Vulnerability and Crashes
Update: Late in December 2020 Microsoft issued an update to the WDK/EWDK that includes mitigations for this security issue. See our blog post describing these updates. tl;dr Last week (week of 5 July 2020) OSR found and reported a bug to Microsoft that has both security and reliability implications for driver developers. New functions introduced […]
NTSTATUS to Win32 Error Code Mappings
TL;DR: Shortcut to a PDF version of the NTSTATUS to Win32 ERROR code mapping table: PDF version of The Table here Some time ago, for reasons known only to our friends in Redmond, the Microsoft Knowledge Base article that listed all the NTSTATUS values and their equivalent Win32 ERROR mappings disappeared. I found this particularly […]
Beware: VS 2019 V16.4.x Update Breaks the WDK
Update 1 April 2020: VS 2019 V16.5.2 has been released, and it does appear to fix both problems reported in this post. TL;DR DO NOT update VS 2019 beyond 16.4.0, or you risk breaking the WDK, to the point that it won’t compile anything when Code Analysis is enabled (and you can’t subsequently turn off […]
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