Microsoft Office to begin publishing Office symbols

Microsoft Office will begin publishing symbols for Windows via the Microsoft Public Symbol Server to help improve security and performance for the company’s customers and partners.

The Redmond, Wash. IT giant says the move will help empower the cybersecurity community to protect customers by providing additional information to security researchers to help them find and report security issues in Office products.

In a blog, Microsoft defines symbol files as such:

Symbol files are created by the compiler when you build your project. Symbol files contain information – symbols – that the debugger uses while analyzing a program.

Some basic symbols, such as function names, global variables, are needed for even the most rudimentary debugging and are called public symbols while files containing additional information like local variables and line numbers are called private symbols. Symbol files that contain public symbols alone are called stripped symbol files – which Microsoft Office will be publishing on the Symbol Server.

Researchers will be able to create more detailed and actionable reports that includes stack traces from tools like Process Monitor, WinDbg or Visual Studio to help engineers fix issues faster, the company says.

In addition, Microsoft say symbols will help customers and partners better understand and diagnose issues, and enable the development of more advanced performance tools and insights.

According to Microsoft, independent hardware and software vendors can use Office public symbols with their own diagnostic environment to performance test and tune their products.

Also, performance test suites that use Office as a measurement can leverage Office public symbols to provide more tailored performance reporting to their test suite customers, Microsoft says in a Security Response Center blog.

The company says it makes certain symbols, binary code and other executables available via the Microsoft Symbol Server for use in debugging and testing of the user’s software in connection with Microsoft software, and not for any unauthorized use.

Symbols for the following builds and future builds will be published on a continuing basis: