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6 Months On, Vista Security Still Besting Linux
Martin writes "Great report on security vulnerabilities for MS/Linux/OS X. This is a revised version of the one Jeff Jones did back on March 21: Windows Vista — 90 Day Vulnerability Report. This time he did what the Linux community had asked. Everyone complained that he did the report based on a full Linux distro including optional components, not on just a base OS install. So this time he did both; Vista still came out on top. I was shocked that Apple was even on the list as I believed all those Mac commercials!"
Point me at the problems in Linux and I'll fix them.
What? Can't do that with Vista?
I'll take Linux, thank you.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Jeff Jones ... This time he did what the Linux community had asked.
He went and f*cked himself?
Sure, if EVERY action you do prompts a "You are clicking your mouse, cancel or allow", or some other message, sure that is security, but then you are left with a crappy user experience. I think Linux and Mac have got a better balance between allowing actions in user mode without authorization and actions requiring authorization.
...as popular as Linux, then it will be targeted, too. Or something like that.
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html Updated response "Jeff Jones Vista security progress."
This is stupid, Linux as a distro is a complete solution from A-Z ... Vista is a bit of a solution as its just an operating system with limited services. Why did he do it to Vista anyway? shouldn't he be doing it to a server edition of Windows?
When i see a windows system and linux system that do exactly the same things have the same purpose software installed on them i can see the viability of the test.
Further, malware runs rampet in Windows, nearly 50% of Vista's vulns were not patched, where regardless of how many Linux has they get fixed when found. More secure? You tell me is a nightclub more secure when the bouncer only kicks out half the troublemakers whole a tougher and meaner club down the street deals with all of them?
Look, Everybody! A company is trying to use statistics to make themselves look good, when that's not necessarily the case!
Nothing to see here, please move along...
This has already been analysed at microsoft-watch, and several flaws are pointed out there, the most basic one being that counting flaws is not a good measure of security anyway.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
On the back of recent news that less than half of Vista "issues" have been patched, yet alone publicly announced, we get another article touting the merits of two things that can't be directly compared.
Sometimes I see Open Source kicking itself in the face with all the transparency it offers, yet I'm overwhelmed with a sense of pride and happiness that communities can develop such a transparent process in the public eye.
Discovering problems and exploiting them in a closed source product is quite a daunting task - I'd say almost 4 times as much work as exploiting a system where you can compile debug symbols into the binary, and nothing short of 1000 times harder than if you had the source code. What these "reports" and discoveries show is that layers of obfuscation act to confuse people as to the actual level of vulnerability you're exposed to.
There are many vulnerability hunters out there, now, employed by governments across the world simply to "dive in" at a deepend of closed applications looking for exploitable code - closed source simply means that only wealthy, bigger teams will be successful. Open Source means that anyone can help thwart these hunters, makes vulnerability research fair game, and most importantly, accepts community involvement into the fixing and pre-emptive policy that makes OS software better software.
Matt
One canard trotted out by MS defenders *used* to be "Windows has more vulnerabilities discovered because it's so popular, everyone attacks it!". Watch for that line to be modified in the coming months as more MS proponents switch to "it's more secure by design". Keeping the "only more vulnerabilities discovered because it's so widely installed" would imply that Vista is not widely installed/used, which is not good PR.
So, when Linux had fewer vulnerabilities, it was because it was obscure. When Vista has fewer vulnerabilities, it's because it's fundamentally more secure. I'm not trying to be sarcastic here - it may very well be *true*. It's just something to keep in mind as you watch the never-ending stream of these 'vulnerability/exploit' reports come out every few months.
creation science book
There are still a lot of problems with this 'comparison'. For instance:
- The 'reduced feature set' used for the comparison still contains a lot of software not include with windows
- All information is based on what the company behind the software discloses. I believe that not all holes in Vista that MS knows about are disclosed. It is also not unlikely that what Microsoft calls 'critical' is not the same as what Canonical calls 'critical'. In any case, different measures are used for the different OS's, and you can't compare things that are measured in different ways.
- The usual 'less known holes != safer' discussion...
I personally don't know which OS is safer, but based on these numbers, I am not going to draw any conclusions.
Jan
Why should I care whether or not people run Linux, or Windows, or *BSD, or Mac OSX, or Novell, or freakin' Amigas? At home.
Run whatever the fuck you want.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
He's not comparing vulnerabilities - he's comparing vulnerability disclosures.
It's not a measure of how secure the OSes are - it's a measure of how secretive the makers of the OSes are.
I approach this as someone who does not know a tremendous amount about how to measure security flaws, or what various security flaws really mean...
But the survey listed also shows Windows XP as the second most secure operating system of the ones surveyed.
I can believe that Microsoft improved their security with Vista. But if they also tell me their security was great with Windows XP, I have to conclude that they're fudging the numbers.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Since Open Source rigorously discloses every flaw known in it, what is the value of comparisons of one Vendor's chosen disclosures versus that which is 100% transparent?
None
Microsoft only discloses what it has to and is often at odds with security researchers about problems only to be proven wrong later. One claim from a blog was that Vista shipped with 60,000 bugs. How many of those are documented for the public?
I can say that on my test certified Vista machine, brand new from Dell, I've already seen the network card totally disappear from the system only to reappear again an hour later. The Broadcom diagnostic tool reported no hardware issues. The Explorer shell still crashes/stalls frequently. Files get locked with no way aside from a reboot to unlock them. Wifi fails to reconnect to the same network it was previously connected to when sspi broadcast for that network is disabled. I just tried restoring a hibernated laptop, previously connected to a domain. Black screen & hard reboot.
Beyond that, on this brand new machine, specced for Vista. Vista is SLOW.
MS, concentrate on making Vista better instead of having people do useless studies. kthnxbye
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Rather than take his word for it why not just check at Secunia.
Vista
Ubuntu 6.06
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I looked at the user comments at the bottem of the article. One juicy tidbit was to this link..
i crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/m
The biggest bug in Windows is between the chair and keyboard. The item in question is gullable, has admin privilages, and can run widely dispensed Windows specific code. As a sample of this, just look at the members of any botnet and the OS in use.
Anything that doesn't run Windows code and has the default of not running admin is more secure than patched Windows in most cases.
Vista still runs Windows code, it's biggest fault, but it seems to be driving towards better system security and user permissions.
The truth shall set you free!
So, how does he account for all the silent patching that Microsoft is doing?. (Link complements of Groklaw.)
More on Google.
Honestly, how can one really compare Windows against Linux when Microsoft is patching things silently? It's not a fair comparison to any vendor because you don't know what got fixed; let alone what was actually problematic. When you have one community disclosing every bug, and another disclosing only those that become high-profile for them - or likely to become high-profile since they were disclosed by others or something like that - you will not get a fair comparison.
So, if he really wants to do a fair comparison, he should get internal reports from Microsoft about their bugs, security and otherwise. Yes, CVE and similar hold the security vulnerability bugs; and you can do a comparison iff you get the security bugs that Microsoft found internally and didn't bother to report - then you would have a level set of reports.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Good grief! It's been YEARS!!! since we first heard about the superior nature of Linux/UNIX security, and we still see a crapflood of articles about it every time there is a slow news day, like when all the information about the first generation iPhone finally emerges and there are no more iPhone stories in the queue, then BAMMO! Right on schedule, another story about LINUX vs. Windows security. This story is even a TROLL, all on with a headline about Vista besting Linux. What crap! ENOUGH with these LINUX/Windows security shootout stories, already!
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
These comparisons are a joke. The number of bugs or vulnerabilities itself is completely meaningless because of the wide variety of issues you can have. For example, would you rather have 10 vulnerabilities that each enable a malicious Web site to crash your browser, or 1 vulnerability that enables a malicious Web site to browse your local disk?
Vista still encourages users to run with higher privileges than necessary, and the platform is still host to over 99% of the viruses and malware ever created. It is not even recommended to run Windows without third-party security enhancements such as anti-virus. Many will tell you to run it only in a virtualizer, not on bare hardware, so you can wipe the Windows "disk" every night and start fresh the next day. In fact, Microsoft will tell you to do that, it's what VirtualPC is for.
Anyone who believes this crap deserves Vista. Enjoy.
The fundamental failure with the phrase "Vista is still more secure..." starts with the incontrovertible fact that Windows is shipped as a black box.
The temporary absence of security issues with Vista means nothing because neither the scope nor the scale of exploits is known. That is commonly described by the phrase "security through obscurity."
History has shown that Microsoft's approach to security is to talk a good game. Period. While I do not doubt Microsoft has hired excellent security programmers, their contributions don't make it through the management gauntlet.
Another way to highlight my point:
When you buy a windows-equipped box will you:
1: Use email on win32 without an antivirus application?
2. Go on the internet on win32 without a firewall?
3. Run win32 without a NAT?
I propose the following experiment instead:
Computer 1: Linux desktop distro immediately after install with no firewall script.
Computer 2: Vista equipped PC straight out of the box with the windows supplied firewall disabled.
Computer 3: Mac OSX straight out of the box.
Run tripwire on all three machines and put them directly on the internet. (aka no NAT)
That might be a better way to compare default security of OS's.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You can't win, Moderator. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful through meta-moderation and Excellent karma than you could possibly imagine.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
There are several fundamental flaws in the arguments in this article:
- He compares OS vulnerabilities of the first 90 days since first release. This doesn't tell us which OS is the most secure at this moment. Merely, it tells that more recent OS's have undergone more testing prior to release.
- He notes 125 known issues with RHEL prior to release compared to 0 for Windows Vista, but of course no vulnerabilities are known prior to release as Vista is closed source and has not been available for public scrutiny, while RHEL is built on available open source code.
But that's not all, differences in how bugs are classified may make some OS's appear more secure - it is known that Microsoft has classified vulnerabilities as bugs thus reducing the "official vulnerability number". Without a strictly uniform and independent classification scheme for bugs, there is simply no data to compare.
A reasonable comparison would compare the OS's vulnerability issues the past 90 days, that is with fully patched systems. Known issues that have not yet been patched should not be included as this simply is caused by the longer time for scrutiny of older OS's. Secondly, bugs must be classified in a coherent manner: Remote root, remote user, local root, local user, DOS etc...
This document is useless in the discussion of which OS is the most secure to run as of today. There is no way that a conclusion can me made in favour of any OS on the list.
It appears that OpenBSD remains the most secure system, and I bet FreeBSD is a strong contender.
it's not the holes but the number of active exploits that we should be counting.
I agree. The trouble is nobody wants to point fingers because they might get slapped. Read any of the news articles regarding the millions of bots in botnets. Every one of them I could find said "PCs". Not one article mentioned an operating system or version that was compromised. I searched Google, Yahoo, and anyplace else I could to find out if the bots had something in common such as Firefox, AIM, Flash 9, or a paticular OS. The details were sparse. If anything was mentioned it was Internet Explorer exploits and compromised websites. A search on the compromised websites gave the same generic results. About the only commonality was SQL with no mention of what flavor such as My-SQL or MS-SQL There was no mention of OS, web server or anything else. I hate thin articles when I am trying to avoid common exploits. If I can't use one SQL, can I use the other and which is which?
From the articles, I get the feeling I can't use a PC as a client with IM and I can't use an SQL enabled webserver. Other than that, there is very little hard data on botnets in the news.
The truth shall set you free!