Flawed Survey Suggests XP More Secure Than Vista

SkeeLo writes "One of Vista's big selling points is security, but a report from CRN concludes that Vista offers little in the way of security advancements over Windows XP. Ars Technica analyzed the report and found some methodological problems. 'The report faults Vista for "providing no improvement in virus protection vs. XP," but of course Windows Vista does not ship with antivirus software — something the reviewer fails to mention. Faulting an AV-less Vista for not stopping viruses is a bit like faulting a door without a lock for opening when the handle is twisted.' That's not all: 'It was also disappointing to see CRN completely ignore the issue of buffer overflows, which has been addressed well in Vista by most accounts. This was a major weak spot with XP, and so far, Vista looks strong in this area, strong enough that Vista may never get its own "SQL Slammer." Why CRN didn't address this is a mystery, as it is no minor matter.'"

Comments

I guess nobody noticed

[Whuffo]

The summary says that Vista has "taken care" of buffer overflow problems. I'd like to submit that one of the key features of XP SP2 was that they'd gone over the code completely and eliminated all unchecked buffers - which (according to MS) eliminated buffer overflow problems.

Microsoft is their own worst enemy; they make wild claims about the functionality of their latest version but that functionality never meets their or their customers expectations. Then some exploit points out that they were being economical with the truth. Much like a recently patched (again) exploit that affected 98, NT, 2000, XP and Vista. Seems somewhat odd that an operating system that has been completely rewritten at great expense and effort should be affected by the SAME bug that has been in their products for years.

I mean, how can a company whose email clients automatically launch attachments say that they take security seriously? Let's not get started on the brain-dead file association open / execution misfeatures in every version up to and including Vista. Here's an interesting exercise to see how bad things can get: rename a safe executable to a filename with a WAV extension. Now double-click it; the executable runs. Combine that with browsers and email clients that automatically play WAV files and you've got a very exploitable platform.

What continues to amaze me is that the file type security is applied based on the file extension - but when you execute a file, the system looks at the file header to determine how to open / execute it. This bit of design stupidity has been the cause of millions of systems being exploited. Just a simple check to see if the file header matches the selected file type would go a long way - but no, this is too difficult. Here, have a UAC nuisance instead...