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Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a set of hardware and software technologies that perform additional checks on memory to help protect against malicious code exploits.

Hardware-enforced DEP marks all memory locations in a process as non-executable unless the location explicitly contains executable code. There is a class of malicious code attacks that try to insert and run code from non-executable memory locations. DEP helps prevent these attacks by intercepting them and raising an exception.

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To determine whether hardware-enforced DEP is available on your computer, follow these steps.

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
2. At the prompt type the following and then press ENTER.

wmic OS Get DataExecutionPrevention_Available

If the output is “TRUE”, hardware-enforced DEP is available on your computer.

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To determine the current DEP support policy, follow these steps.

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
2. At the prompt type the following and then press ENTER.

wmic OS Get DataExecutionPrevention_SupportPolicy

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“Microsoft has continued to investigate the use of software-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) to mitigate the Windows Meta File vulnerability for Windows XP Service Pack 2 users. As a result of this investigation, we have updated our guidance regarding DEP to say that some hardware-based DEP, when enabled, can mitigate this vulnerability; however, software-based DEP does not mitigate this vulnerability”

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