At some point in the next few months, Microsoft will start encouraging people to upgrade to Windows 11. If we’re lucky, the company will have learned from its “Get Windows 10” debacle and will not launch a glorified malware application. Regardless of how the company approaches the topic, however, you can bet we’re all going to get blitzed with advertising one way or another.

But that lovely event/hostage-taking is still in the future. For now, Microsoft would appreciate it if everyone stopped downloading the leaked version of Windows 11 that popped up last week. In the process, the OS developer has confirmed what everybody already knew — Windows 11 is, in fact, an official thing that’s happening.

In the future, Weston would like to see ReFirm become part of the certification. “To not only make sure that you’re shipping the device secure, but that it’s being scanned regularly by this ReFirm firmware technology and you’re keeping the firmware up to date.”

Despite the name, ReFirm might not stay restricted to firmware. Microsoft has static and dynamic analysis tools it can add to the product, which Weston compared to VirusTotal’s frequent updates with new analysis options. “I can keep putting layers of tools in that analysis pipeline. I think this has the opportunity to be a VirusTotal-like product that, rather than looking for malware, is looking for vulnerabilities in an arbitrary object. We’re focused on firmware because that seems like the right application, but it could be VM snapshots or many, many other things.”

There’s good news for fans of the open-source Binwalk tool, too. Microsoft will be investing heavily in that, because it’s already widely used by multiple teams across the company who have feature requests, says Weston: “I think we probably have a few years’ worth of backlog ideas already!”