Microsoft previews Project Springfield, a cloud-based bug detector

Microsoft is making available to its customers one of the most sophisticated tools it has for rooting out potential security vulnerabilities in software including Windows, Office and other products.

The offering is code named Project Springfield, and up until now, the team that built it has thought of it as the million-dollar bug detector.

That’s because every time the system finds a potentially serious bug proactively, before a piece of software is released, it is saving a developer the costly effort of having to release a patch reactively, once the product is already public. With widely used software such as an operating system or productivity suite, deploying those patches can cost as much as $1 million, the researchers say.

“Those are the bugs that hackers will try to use,” said Patrice Godefroid, a principal researcher at Microsoft who invented a key technology behind Project Springfield and is the project’s chief scientist. “The more we can find those bugs ourselves, the more we can fix them before we ship the software.”

Microsoft announced a preview of Project Springfield on Monday at its Ignite technology conference in Atlanta. It has previously been testing the new cloud security service with a small number of customers and collaborators using software on a smaller scale than Windows and Office.

The company itself has been using a key component of Project Springfield, called SAGE, since the mid-2000s, testing products including Windows 7 prior to release.

Although the Windows 7 operating system code had already been checked by other, similar security tools, Godefroid said SAGE unearthed a number of additional vulnerabilities, eventually accounting for one-third of all the bugs this kind of security testing, which is called fuzz testing, discovered prior to the release.

The team overseeing the fuzz testing was impressed.

“There aren’t a lot of tools that can do what SAGE does,” said Mark Wodrich, a senior security engineer with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection.

One tool in the security toolbox

Fuzz testing is far from the only security measure developers use, but security experts say it’s an important one in the security development lifecycle.

David Molnar, the Microsoft researcher who leads Project Springfield, said fuzz testing is ideal for software that regularly incorporate inputs such as documents, images, videos or other pieces of information that may not be trustworthy. Fuzz testing looks for vulnerabilities that could open the door for bad actors to launch malicious attacks or simply crash the system, causing delays and other problems.

“These are the serious bugs that it’s worth investing to prevent,” Molnar said.

Broadly speaking, fuzz testing works like this: The system throws random, unexpected inputs at a piece of software to look for instances in which those unforeseen actions cause the software to crash, signaling a security vulnerability.

Project Springfield builds on that idea with what it calls “white box fuzz testing.” It uses artificial intelligence to ask a series of “what if” questions and make more sophisticated decisions about what might trigger a crash and signal a security concern. Each time it runs, it gathers data to hone in on the areas that are most critical. This more focused, intelligent approach makes it more likely that Project Springfield will find vulnerabilities other fuzzing tools might miss.

From software research to security product

SAGE grew out of years of Microsoft’s basic research into formal methods, which are systems for reasoning about code to look for imperfections.

As SAGE developed, the researchers were regularly publishing research papers detailing the advantages of their approach. That, in turn, drew the interest of security experts and other researchers who wanted to use the tool as well.

“Customers had asked about it for years, but we’d never been able to offer it to them,” Molnar said.

In order to make the software security tool available to a broader group of people with fewer resources and security expertise than the Windows and Office organizations, the researchers built Project Springfield. It bundles SAGE with other tools for fuzz testing and adds an easy-to-use dashboard and other interfaces that make it accessible for people without an extensive security background.

Then, it runs its tests using an Azure cloud-based system, so individual clients don’t need to have data centers of their own. Finally, the results are delivered securely to the customers, so they can fix the bugs and test the code again.

“It’s very simple to use – it’s ‘fire and forget,’” said Gavin Thomas, a principal security software engineering manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center. “You set it up and you walk away.”

Thomas first used Project Springfield when a Microsoft customer came to him for help in looking for security vulnerabilities. Thomas said Project Springfield proved as easy to use as any app, and it was so effective at finding bugs that Thomas is in the process of implementing it in his own labs. That will save his expert security engineers the time of manually creating similar tools, allowing them to focus on other issues.

Too many bugs, not enough security experts

It turns out that Microsoft customer’s challenge wasn’t unusual.

Project Springfield is being released at a time when many companies are facing a tough conundrum: Serious attacks on software are going up, but the supply of security engineers trained to fight those attacks is staying steady. That means plenty of companies can’t afford, or can’t find, the staff they need to do fuzz testing. They need an easier, more automated solution.

“Most companies may not have a security engineer and wouldn’t even know what a fuzzer is,” Thomas said.

It’s also coming at a time when many companies are revamping their systems to appeal to new digital tastes, adding mobile offerings, online sales or cloud-based services. Chad A. Holmes, a principal and cyber strategy, technology and growth leader for the professional services firm Ernst & Young LLP, said that means many companies need a system like Project Springfield, which has the cloud-based capacity to run a very high volume of security tests at the same time and root out the most critical concerns.

“That’s one of the largest challenges they run into, the scale of testing these applications,” Holmes said. “That’s where a tool like Springfield comes in.”

EY may offer Project Springfield as part of the security offerings it has for customers.

Making beer and finding bugs

For many companies, finding bugs is important not just because it can protect a company against hackers but also because it can save time and money.

Take the craft beer brewer Deschutes Brewery, for example. If there’s a glitch in the software it uses for analytics, it can literally mean that money – or, in this case, beer – has to go down the drain.

“The brewery doesn’t get a batch of beer back when something goes wrong,” said Bryan Owen, a cyber security manager with OSIsoft, which has been helping Deschutes build a system that can bring together data from multiple sources. “It’s just lost.”

OSIsoft used Project Springfield to proactively look for bugs and other vulnerabilities as part of an overhaul of Deschutes’ analytics systems, which included installing its PI System, PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure, and deploying the Cortana Intelligence Suite.

Deschutes Brewery’s brewmaster, Brian Faivre, said the new analytics systems have helped them figure out ways to make better beer, without having to worry about the technical details.

“Our job is really focusing on quality and making beer,” Faivre said. “If, at the end of the day, this is helping us do a better job, that’s what we really value and we care about.”

Beating the bad guys

Project Springfield also has been developed at a time in which Microsoft researchers are getting more aggressive about quickly translating their groundbreaking research into tools customers can use.

With Project Springfield, Peter Lee, the corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft Research’s New Experiences and Technologies organization, said the team was determined to make sure it was “literally rubbing elbows” with the clients who were participating in an early preview of the system, having regular, face-to-face meetings to make sure it would meet their security needs.

“I actually view it as a collaboration,” he said. “In my mind, we’re doing the research together.”

Lee said that type of collaboration between researchers and developers is especially important in the security field, because it’s so tough for the good guys in computer security to stay ahead of the bad guys. That’s because the bad guys have the tools, expertise and financial incentive to exploit vulnerabilities faster than the good guys can find them.

He sees cloud-based tools like Project Springfield as a key tool in the good guys’ arsenal.

“This is one of the areas where, finally, the good guys have an advantage,” he said.

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Allison Linn is a senior writer at Microsoft. Follow her on Twitter.