Las Vegas, U.S.A. — Microsoft Corp.’s Trustworthy Computing Group named Vasilis Pappas the winner of the company’s first-ever BlueHat Prize contest, a competition that awards the development of new, innovative computer security defense technologies.

The company presented Pappas, currently a Ph.D. student at Columbia University in New York, with $200,000 at the Microsoft Researcher Appreciation Party.

“A year ago we posed a challenge to the researcher community and asked them to shift their focus from solely identifying and reporting individual vulnerabilities to investing in new lines of defensive research that could mitigate entire classes of attacks,” said Mike Reavey, senior director, Microsoft Security Response Center.

“It’s with great pleasure that we congratulate the winner of our inaugural BlueHat Prize contest, Vasilis, for his submission of a novel defensive technology that advances the challenging issue of exploit mitigation of some of the most popular attack techniques we’re seeing today.”

kBouncer, the winning entry among 20 submissions, detects abnormal control transfers using the Last Branch Recording feature of Intel processors to mitigate Return Oriented Programming (ROP). ROP is an advanced technique that attackers use to combine short pieces of benign code, already present in a system, for a malicious purpose.

By using supported hardware features, kBouncer can be implemented with lower cost to performance and development time. All three BlueHat Prize finalists designed technologies to mitigate attacks that leverage ROP, underscoring how prominent the exploitation technique is today.

Microsoft awarded first runner-up, Ivan Fratric, $50,000 for his submission, called ROPGuard, and a surprise $10,000 cash reward was given to the second runner-up, Jared DeMott, for /ROP. In addition to the monetary prizes, the company gave all three winners subscriptions to the Microsoft Developer Network valued at $10,000 each.

“The Blue Hat prize is more than a competition; it’s the future of security defense, where the community comes together to collectively take on some of the toughest problems we face and make the computing ecosystem safer,” said Matt Thomlinson, general manager, Trustworthy Computing Group, Microsoft.

“The result is that in under a year, we went from challenge to creation to integration of some of the BlueHat Prize finalists’ technologies into the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 3.5 Technology Preview, to protect against known and unknown threats. We’ll continue to evaluate additional integration as appropriate.”

The BlueHat Prize competition was designed to challenge the security community to look beyond the norm of problems, such as vulnerabilities, and instead focus on developing innovative solutions to pressing security challenges.

Microsoft accepted entries from Aug. 3, 2011, until April 1, 2012, and then a panel of Microsoft security engineers judged the submissions based on the following criteria: practicality and functionality (30 percent); robustness — how easy it would be to bypass the proposed solution (30 percent); and impact (40 percent). The official BlueHat Prize competition rules and guidelines are available at http://www.BlueHatPrize.com.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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Microsoft Corporation recently announced that John W. Thompson, chief executive officer of privately held Virtual Instruments and former chairman and CEO of Symantec Corporation, was appointed to the company’s board of directors, returning the board’s size to 10 members.

“John has extraordinary technology and business expertise, and we are delighted that he is joining Microsoft’s board of directors,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman.

Thompson currently serves as CEO of Virtual Instruments, a privately held company located in San Jose, Calif., whose products are designed to ensure the performance and availability of applications deployed in virtualized and private cloud computing environments. Since 2009, Thompson has been an active investor in early-stage technology companies in Silicon Valley.

Thompson served as chairman and CEO of Symantec Corporation, helping transform Symantec into a leader in security, storage and systems management solutions. During his 10-year tenure as CEO from 1999 to 2009, Symantec’s revenues grew from $632 million to $6.2 billion, and its worldwide workforce grew to more than 17,500 employees. Thompson stepped down as CEO of Symantec in 2009, and stepped down from Symantec’s board of directors in 2011.

Previously, Thompson held a number of leadership positions at IBM, including sales, marketing, software development and general manager of IBM Americas. He was a member of IBM’s Worldwide Management Council.

“John brings a wealth of experience, from enterprise customers to individual consumers, as well as the insights that come from running a successful large global software company and a fast-emerging startup. He will be a great addition to our board,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive officer.

“I am honored to join the Microsoft board and work with this exceptional team,” Thompson said. “Microsoft has been a leader across the entire information technology landscape for decades, and I look forward to sharing my experiences and contributing to the future direction and growth of this global leader.”

Thompson currently serves on the board of United Parcel Service, and he has served on a number of government boards and commissions, including the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the National Infrastructure Advisory Committee, and the Silicon Valley Blue Ribbon Task Force on Aviation Security and Technology. He formerly served on the national board of Teach for America, an organization dedicated to eliminating educational inequities for all children.

He received a bachelor of business administration from Florida A&M, and a master’s degree in management from the Sloan Fellows program of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

In addition to Thompson, Microsoft’s board of directors consists of Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman; Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO; Dina Dublon, former chief financial officer of JPMorgan Chase; Raymond V. Gilmartin, former chairman, president and CEO of Merck & Co.; Reed Hastings, founder, chairman and CEO of Netflix;

Dr. Maria M. Klawe, president, Harvey Mudd College; David F. Marquardt, general partner at August Capital; Charles H. Noski, vice chairman of Bank of America Corporation; and Dr. Helmut G. W. Panke, former chairman of the board of management at BMW AG.

Image Courtesy of   James M Phelps, Jr / Shutterstock.com

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