As we recently published on the Microsoft Edge Dev blog, Adobe and Microsoft are enhancing the PDF experience and value users have come to expect in Microsoft Edge. Adobe brings an unrivalled breadth of experience in the PDF space, and we are looking forward to unveiling new features and experiences with them in the future. The Microsoft Edge Vulnerability Research team has been heavily involved in this process and want to share some of the work that we have been doing alongside our colleagues at Adobe to help ensure your PDF experience is secure.

One of the key pillars of our strategy for maintaining the security standards of Microsoft Edge is to “make exploits hard”. A significant part of our work in PDF was to ensure that we made no compromises on the security-enforcing technologies already deployed in our PDF stack. One such technology is PartitionAlloc, a highly performant, dynamic, and secure heap implementation developed on Chromium, which is designed with security in mind. This technology is already used extensively across Microsoft Edge. If you are not familiar with PartitionAlloc, a comprehensive introduction can be found in the design docs. To put it simply, PartitionAlloc is designed in such a way as to keep objects of different types separate from each other with minimal intervention from the developer. An example of a security mechanism it provides is the ability to break exploitation primitives by isolating objects using Partitions and MiraclePtr/*Scan (two mitigations that aim to minimize the impact of Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerabilities). This unique heap implementation provides a rapid understanding of vulnerabilities and a strong layer of protection that the new PDF stack will benefit from.

Alongside PartitionAlloc, we ensured that a suite of additional technical countermeasures, also already used across Microsoft Edge, were compatible with the new PDF stack. This includes compile-time mitigations such as Intel’s new Control Flow Enforcement Technology (CET), enabled in Microsoft Edge with update 94 for CPUs that support it. This complements Microsoft’s own Control Flow Guard (CFG). We are pleased to announce that our new PDF stack will benefit from all these technologies in addition to the industry standard protections expected from modern compilation toolchains.

The second pillar of our approach to security is to “make exploits rare”. Strategically, this means building and running our fuzz-testing capabilities. Readers who are unfamiliar with fuzzing can look at the brief intro to fuzzing prepared by our colleagues in Microsoft Research. The article provides detailed insight into just how important this tool is for developers. In our Microsoft Edge Vulnerability Research blog, most articles, in some way, mention our use of fuzzing as one of our main tools for identifying potential security issues in Microsoft Edge. Whilst the technique has been used for quite some time, it is only in recent years that the tooling and compiler support has matured to the point where it became more easily integrated into the development lifecycle. Prior to this support, fuzzing was more often done via grammar or syntax-based solutions such as Peach Fuzzer. We have invested significant effort in building out our fuzzing support for this project, surpassing the coverage numbers currently achieved.

A significant string to our fuzzing bow is the use of the Microsoft owned OneFuzz solution to power our aggressive scaling requirements. More information on OneFuzz can be found on the project website, but in essence it is a scalable fuzzing solution powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. To complement the fuzzing resources from Microsoft, Adobe has also deployed their own OneFuzz-based solution. To date Microsoft has developed 61 unique fuzzers for the new PDF stack (and counting), covering features from the document parser to image streams. The Microsoft security team has been running these fuzzers 24 hours a day for the past year, an expenditure of almost 1 million compute hours in fuzzing alone. Typical issues discovered have been common memory corruption bugs, out of bound reads and writes, and an occasional type-confusion bug. This is all just part of a larger commitment to security by Adobe and Microsoft.

The final pillar of our approach to security is to engage with our researcher and user communities. Ensuring that our PDF solution is covered within the scope of the Microsoft incentive program is core to our success and we are pleased to announce its inclusion. Issues in PDF will be eligible for bounty awards within the existing framework of our incentive program. We plan to provide our researcher community with the tools and guidance to effectively perform research against our new PDF library. We will begin accepting reports through the MSRC portal as soon as the feature makes it to the Stable channel later in 2023. Keep an eye out for more details on this!

We look forward to continued collaboration with Adobe to bring greater value and peace of mind to our users. We are also excited to connect with you, the community, for your feedback on this solution and your contributions to the bug bounty, as we strive to build the best and most secure PDF solution.