There was a time when it seemed Microsoft viewed security researchers as the enemy, and a big public relations problem. They were the troublemakers who poked holes in Microsoft's operating systems, browser, and desktop software. And they published exploits that helped to automate attacks. Today, Microsoft announced that it hired one of them.Security expert Matt Miller has probably sent the phone lines ablaze at Redmond a number of times in the past few years. He's also known in security circles as Skape, and has been one of the primary developers of the pentesting/attack tool Metasploit. Today, Microsoft's Secure Development Lifecycle evangelist Michael Howard announced on his Microsoft blog that Miller would be joining the Security Science team:

Good news! Matt Miller, author of plenty of cutting-edge security research, including my fave "A Brief History of Exploitation Techniques and Mitigations on Windows" has joined the Security Science team to work on improved ways to find security vulnerabilities and better software defenses through mitigations. Most recently, Matt's been focused on design review for Windows 7.

A set of eyes like Miller's can only help reduce the number of attack vectors and vulnerabilities in Windows 7. Here's a rundown on some of his recent presentations:

WOOT: 2008: Modeling the trust boundaries created by securable objects

ToorCon: 2008: State of the Exploit

Breakpoint: A Brief History of Exploitation Techniques and Mitigations on Windows

ToorCon 2007: Cthulhu: A software analysis framework built on Phoenix

ToorCon 2005: Exploitation Chronomancy

BlackHat 2005: Beyond EIP

In addition to Metasploit, Miller's software work includes Address Space Layout Randomization tool wehntrust, x64 PE file analyzer x64auto, winstrace for tracking system calls, and memgreg -- a dynamic memory analysis tool for FreeBSD and Linux.

More information on Miller can be found here.