Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Microsoft Corporation

Mario C Goertzel

Gopal Parupudi

Bharat Shah

Edward F Reus

Murthy Srinivas

Henricus Johannes Maria Meijer

John R Douceur

Scott Field

Abolade Gbadegesin

Praerit Garg

Richard Douglas Hill

Michael M Swift

Michael Joseph Healy

Shannon J Chan

David E Kays

Mazhar Naveed Mohammed

Alexander A Mitchell

Joseph Dadzie

Kenneth A Showman

Gregory A Jensenworth

Joshua W Dunn

Richard Bruce Ward

Amar Dinesh Patel

Stephen Scott Evans

Michael V Sliger

Kristjan Eric Hatlelid

Nathaniel S Brown

Ryszard K Kott

Derek C Y Cheng

Dietmar Gaertner

Susi E Strom

Christopher Gustav Ewbank

Terry Kennedy

David Kays

Gregory Jensenworth

The subject disclosure relates to techniques for monitoring contextual and performance information of a device for anticipatorily sending update information to the device. An interface component can receive, from the client, contextual information indicating an operating environment of the client and performance information that is associated with one or more operations being performed by the client based on the operating environment, and send, based on correlation information, update information to the client. Further, a service component can to infer a relationship between the contextual information and the performance information to obtain the correlation information. In other embodiments, a client can populate a cache with portion(s) of the contextual information to obtain cached information, and send at least a portion of the cached information to a system including one or more aspects of the service component.

Discovery and mining of performance information of a device for anticipatorily sending updates to the device

Providing safe access of a data item accessed through one of a plurality of access channels while concurrently providing a policy check of the data item. An indication associated with accessing a data item through one access channel of a plurality of access channels may be received. In response to receiving the indication associated with accessing the data item, the data item may be automatically analyzed to determine whether the data item satisfies a policy. Also in response to receiving the indication associated with accessing the data item and while determining whether the data item satisfies the policy, safe access of the data item may be provided. Regardless of the access channel through which the data item was accessed, any of the policy check, the safe access, and the analysis of the data item may be the same.

Safe data access through any data channel

Updates for an enterprise's software product are made available to user devices on-line, even when network resources of the enterprise are unavailable. Software update sets and notifications concerning the update sets may be published by an enterprise for consumption by content distribution partners of the enterprise and parties not affiliated with the enterprise. Each abstraction relating to an update, including update notifications and update sets may include a cryptographic signature for later use in authenticating the source of the abstraction. Update notifications also may include information indicative of: available update sets; and network locations at which the update sets can be accessed. Further, an update notification may be configured with a time-to-live (TTL) value indicating a value of time after which the notification expires. TTL values give the enterprise some control over the distribution of update sets by limiting the lifespan of the update notifications corresponding to the update sets.

Public network distribution of software updates

Described is a technology by which encrypted content is pre-distributed to recipients during a pre-distribution timeframe, for example to distribute protected content to many clients in a controlled manner. At a release moment, a key for decrypting the encrypted content is released. For example, a software update may be pre-distributed in this manner, whereby many clients may receive the updates over time but the update cannot be analyzed for hacking purposes, e.g., to use the update to figure out a prior vulnerability. By rapidly and widely disseminating the key at the release moment, the update is installed on a large percentage of client systems before those systems can be exploited. The content may be allowed to expire before the key is released, or may be canceled or replaced. The content may include a complete file, and/or a delta file that changes another file into a resultant piece of content.

Secure content pre-distribution to designated systems

A method and system for providing system event notifications to clients such as applications. Clients register for notification of one or more types of events with a registration mechanism, and a System Event Notification Service, (SENS), receives system event information and fires event notifications in response thereto. A distribution mechanism selectively communicates the fired event to each client registered for notification thereof based on the type of event. Events include network events, for which the service monitors the connectivity state of the machine, including whether a connection is established or lost, the type of connection (LAN/WAN) and bandwidth information. To monitor a LAN state, the service caches outgoing and incoming network information including errors and packet counts and statistically evaluates this cached information against current information to determine whether the connection is established or lost. The service also determines if a destination (IP address or name) is reachable, by periodically polling destinations. Other system event notifications may be fired, including logon or logoff operations and power management events.

Method for determining and providing network connectivity information

System and method for determining whether a network destination is reachable

Method and mechanism for providing computer programs with computer system events

Context-aware computing systems and methods are described. In some embodiments the context of a computing device is determined by assigning privacy levels to one or more applications that are configured to call a context service module on the computing device to obtain context information from the context service module. A device context is determined with the context service module using context information that is provided by multiple different context providers. A query is received from an application that requests context information pertaining to the context of the computing device and a privacy level associated with the application from which the query was received is determined. Device context information is then selected in accordance with the privacy level of the application from which the query was received. The selected device context information is then returned to the application from which the query was received.

Identity-based context aware computing systems and methods

Restricted execution contexts are provided for untrusted content, such as computer code or other data downloaded from websites, electronic mail messages and any attachments thereto, and scripts or client processes run on a server. A restricted process is set up for the untrusted content, and any actions attempted by the content are subject to the restrictions of the process, which may be based on various criteria. Whenever a process attempt to access a resource, a token associated with that process is compared against security information of that resource to determine if the type of access is allowed. The security information of each resource thus determines the extent to which the restricted process, and thus the untrusted content, has access. In general, the criteria used for setting up restrictions for each untrusted content's process is information indicative of how trusted or untrusted the content is likely to be.

Method and system for secure running of untrusted content

An improved computer network security system and method wherein access to network resources is based on information that includes the location of the connecting user. In general, the less trusted the location of the user, the more the access rights assigned to the user are restricted. A discrimination mechanism and process determines the location of a user with respect to categories of a security policy, such as to distinguish local users, intranet users and dial-up users from one another. Based on information including the location and the user's credentials, an access token is set up that may restrict the user's normal access in accordance with the security policy, such as to not restrict a user's processes beyond the user-based security information in the user's normal access token, while further restricting the same user's access to resources when connecting via a dial-up connection. Restricted tokens are preferably used to implement the location-based discrimination by restricting the security context of users connecting from less trusted locations.

Method and system of security location discrimination

A remote procedure call marshaling architecture provides remote procedure call interoperability between computers having arbitrary native data format pointer sizes not conforming to an on-wire multicanonical data representation of the remote procedure calls. The architecture includes an interface description language compiler having a code path generic to effecting marshaling of data structures containing non-conformant pointers. When compiled to run on a computing platform having a native, non-conformant pointer size, the code path is automatically configured to effect marshaling of data structure containing pointers of the computing platform's native pointer size.

Remote procedure calling with marshaling and unmarshaling of arbitrary non-conformant pointer sizes

A restrict ed access token is created from an existing token, and provides less access than that token. A restricted token may be created by changing an attribute of one or more security identifiers allowing access in the parent token to a setting that denies access in the restricted token and/or removing one or more privileges from the restricted token relative to the parent token. A restricted access token also may be created by adding restricted security identifiers thereto. Once created, a process associates another process with the restricted token to launch the other process in a restricted context that is a subset of its own rights and privileges. A kernel-mode security mechanism determines whether the restricted process has access to a resource by first comparing user-based security identifiers in the restricted token and the intended type of action against a list of identifiers and actions associated with the resource. If no restricted security identifiers are in the restricted token, access is determined by this first check, otherwise a second access check further compares the restricted security identifiers against the list of identifiers and actions associated with the resource. With a token having restricted security identifiers, the process is granted access if both the first and second access checks pass. In this manner, a process is capable of restricting another process, such as possibly unruly code, in the actions it can perform.

Security model using restricted tokens

Growing community of inventors

Kirkland, WA, United States of America

Mario C Goertzel