Graph of Linux Vs. Windows System Calls

cgrayson recommends Richard Stiennon's blog on ZDNet — a post titled Why Windows is less secure than Linux shows a compelling graphical comparison between system calls on the two operating systems. The blogger tips Sana Security for the images. Quoting: "In its long evolution, Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure... [T]hese images... are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up [the same] single page of [HTML] with a single picture."

Comments

Unavoidable.

[Kadin2048]

I think you'd have to resort to a lot of trickery, like stacking vertices on top of each other with zero-length edges, to make the Windows graph appear less complicated than the Linux one. Provided that you model them in the same way, it ought to be pretty apparent that one just has a lot more vertices and edges than the other, even if you did it in a multidimensional space.

Really, the graphs are just a way of artfully showing a simple fact, which is that Windows requires more system calls than Linux, to complete a particular task. If you assume that each system call is a potential vulnerability, and that less calls are inherently better and more secure, than the result is a foregone conclusion. But those are pretty big "ifs," and it seems like someone who was pro-Windows would do better to attack those premises, rather than trying to dispute the graph, if it's indeed representative of the true number of system calls.