"I'm absolutely thrilled," he said. "Building ROPGuard was interesting and it being selected as one of the top three entries in the contest is great, but it's even greater to see an interest to integrate this technology into an actual product and to bring it to the users."

Fratric called EMET the "right first step" in baking anti-ROP technologies like ROPGuard into Windows.

Reavey repeated Microsoft's earlier comment that ROPGuard -- or the technologies crafted by the other finalists, both who also focused on ROP -- would not appear in Windows 8, the upgrade set to launch Oct. 26. "The timing is too tight for Windows 8," said Reavey. "But we we'll continue to look at these ideas."

More likely, security experts have said, is that Microsoft will add one or more of the anti-ROP defenses, and perhaps other technologies submitted in the contest, to Windows 8 as a later update. Putting them into Windows 8 Service Pack 1 (SP1), which would appear a year or more after the operating system's launch, would be logical, those experts have said.

Reavey declined to commit Microsoft to adding any of the new technologies to Windows 7, a move that would involve "backporting" the code to the older OS. But he said the company was considering such backporting and noted that Microsoft has backported before.