Overview
The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) is a utility that helps prevent vulnerabilities in software from being successfully exploited. EMET achieves this goal by using security mitigation technologies. These technologies function as special protections and obstacles that an exploit author must defeat to exploit software vulnerabilities. These security mitigation technologies do not guarantee that vulnerabilities cannot be exploited. However, they work to make exploitation as difficult as possible to perform.
EMET allows users to manage these technologies on their system and provides several unique benefits:
1. No source code needed:
Until now, several of the available mitigations (such as Data Execution Prevention) have required for an application to be manually opted in and recompiled. EMET changes this by allowing a user to opt in applications without recompilation. This is especially handy for deploying mitigations on software that was written before the mitigations were available and when source code is not available.
2. Highly configurable:
EMET provides a higher degree of granularity by allowing mitigations to be individually applied on a per process basis. There is no need to enable an entire product or suite of applications. This is helpful in situations where a process is not compatible with a particular mitigation technology. When that happens, a user can simply turn that mitigation off for that process.
3. Helps harden legacy applications:
It’s not uncommon to have a hard dependency on old legacy software that cannot easily be rewritten and needs to be phased out slowly. Unfortunately, this can easily pose a security risk as legacy software is notorious for having security vulnerabilities. While the real solution to this is migrating away from the legacy software, EMET can help manage the risk while this is occurring by making it harder to hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in the legacy software.
4. Ease of use:
The policy for system wide mitigations can be seen and configured with EMET's graphical user interface. There is no need to locate up and decipher registry keys or run platform dependent utilities. With EMET you can adjust setting with a single consistent interface regardless of the underlying platform.
5. Ease of deploy:
EMET comes with built-in support for enterprise deployment and configuration technologies. This enables administrators to use Group Policy or System Center Configuration Manager to deploy, configure and monitor EMET installations across the enterprise environment.
6. Ongoing improvement:
EMET is a living tool designed to be updated as new mitigation technologies become available. This provides a chance for users to try out and benefit from cutting edge mitigations. The release cycle for EMET is also not tied to any product. EMET updates can be made dynamically as soon as new mitigations are ready.
The toolkit includes several pseudo mitigation technologies aimed at disrupting current exploit techniques. These pseudo mitigations are not robust enough to stop future exploit techniques, but can help prevent users from being compromised by many of the exploits currently in use. The mitigations are also designed so that they can be easily updated as attackers start using new exploit techniques.
Download Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 4.0
The links in following website correspond to file available for this download.
What's new in Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 4.0?
EMET 4.0 includes a number of new features and changes including:
- Certificate Trust: considering the raise of PKI-related attacks, we decided to implement a configurable SSL Certificate Pinning to try to detect Man in the Middle attacks that leverage SSL/TLS certificates. The Certificate Trust feature in EMET is rule-based and allows to pin a specific SSL/TLS certificate to a trusted Root Certificate Authority;
- ROP mitigations and hardening: in the last Technical Preview release of EMET, we introduced some mitigations to try to stop ROP-based attacks by implementing some of the winner ideas of the BlueHat Prize contest. With this new EMET release we hardened the ROP and other mitigations to detect and stop novel attack techniques. For example EMET 4.0 beta is able to stop one ASLR/DEP bypass technique presented at this year’s CanSecWest;
- Early Warning Program: this feature will allow EMET to send contextual data back to Microsoft, through the standard Windows Error Reporting channel, every time that an exploit has been detected and stopped.
- Audit mode: if an exploit is detected, EMET will not kill the attacked process but it will just report the attack and let the process continue. This mode is only applicable to certain mitigations, for example the ROP-related ones, that detect the attack when the process is not already in a crashed state. This feature is useful for enterprise customers for testing purposes and to spot false-positives and app-compat problems without compromising the user experience;
- EMET 4.0 also includes several bug fixes and UI changes to improve the overall user experience. Also, at the end of the installation, EMET will automatically import settings to protect Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat/Reader, and Oracle Java, as well as a pre-defined set of rules for the Certificate Trust feature that will monitor the main Microsoft online services.
More information are available in the User Guide, available in the EMET installation folder.
Note: EMET 4.0 requires .NET Framework 4, and in order to protect Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 you need to install KB2790907 - a mandatory AppCompat update that has been released on March 12th.
System requirements
Supported operating systems: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003 SP2 x64, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Vista SP2, Windows XP SP3
EMET 4 supports the following operating systems and service pack levels:
Client Operating Systems
- Windows XP service pack 3 and above
- Windows Vista service pack 1 and above
- Windows 7 all service packs
- Windows 8
Server Operation Systems
- Windows Server 2003 service pack 1 and above
- Windows Server 2008 all service packs
- Windows Server 2008 R2 all
- Windows Server 2012
References:
EMET 4.0 now available for download
KB Articles: KB2458544
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