The Office 2003 productivity suite has received a brand new extra panoply designed to shield users from malformed files. Microsoft has announced yesterday, May 21, 2007 the availability of the Office Isolated Conversion Environment (MOICE). There has been talk about MOICE for quite a while, and the beginning of May signaled the imminent release of the office 2003 file converters.

Microsoft revealed that the MOICE feature will be added to the Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats with the intended goal to secure the execution of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint binary format files. The Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment will "make it easier for customers to protect themselves from Office files that may contain malicious software, such as unsolicited Office files received from unknown or known sources. MOICE makes it easier by providing new security mitigation technologies designed to convert specific Microsoft Office files types," the Redmond Company revealed.

The tool converts Office 2003 binary documents to Office Open XML format integrated in the Office 2007 via the system's converters. The reason for this is simple, as explained by Microsoft security expert, David LeBlanc: "MOICE takes advantage of an effect we noticed while working on Office 2007 - when we get MSRC cases in, we have to check to see whether it affects each version, including new code. One of the things we noticed is that when we converted an exploit document to the new Office 2007 'Metro' format, it would either fail the conversion, emit a non-exploitable file, or the converter itself would crash. The possibility exists that something could make it all the way through, but we haven't seen any of those yet."

In this context, MOICE is more than a simple conversion tool between Office 2003 binary file formats and the Open XML. It also brings to the table a mechanism built to pre-process documents from the older to the newer formats in an isolated environment. Additionally, the conversion will help ensure that potential threats are stripped from the documents. .doc, .ppt, .pot. .pps, .xls, .xlt and .xla are all the formats supported by MOICE.