The Microsoft Malware Protection Center's security research team has been working on a technology that speeds up the analysis of vulnerabilities. Their goal is a very ambitious one: automate the process of analyzing exploits, indentify malicious input bytes quickly, identify how shell code is executed, and narrow the search space for further manual analysis. Microsoft is sometimes criticized for how quickly the company responds to an emerging threat, so the idea is to integrate this technology in the next version of Forefront, a line of comprehensive security products (for companies) that aims to offer multiple layers of defense against threats. The toolset is dubbed Paladin, and according to the Threat Research & Response Blog, we will be hearing much more about it in the near future:

The results of this technology are very positive on memory corruption vulnerabilities and allow our research team to decrease dramatically the amount of time spent analyzing those vulnerabilities. While it is true that there are types of vulnerabilities that Paladin is not perfectly suited for today we are working diligently to extend this capability towards even broader coverage and higher efficacy. Expect to hear more about Paladin in the months to come and to benefit from this and related research today if you are a customer running the beta of the next version Forefront Threat Management Gateway with our Network Inspection System.

Paladin is actually built on top of a Microsoft Research and Incubation technology previously referred to as Vigilante, which Microsoft said was designed as "an automated worm containment system" that leverages dynamic dataflow analysis to track the use of untrusted data, and blocks it from being executed. Paladin will be much more, and if Microsoft is can achieve what it hopes, we will be seeing a much shorter response time to threats in the coming years, at least for those who use Microsoft products.