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By Date By Thread 6 Month Vista Vuln Report, Debunked From: "Kristian Hermansen" <kristian.hermansen () gmail com>

Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:09:31 -0400

This report from Microsoft's Jeff R. Jones is ludicrous: http://www.csoonline.com/pdf/6_Month_Vista_Vuln_Report.pdf The Microsoft "researcher" claims that Windows Vista is exponentially less vulnerable than many Linux distributions and Mac OS X. It may be true that the default Vista installation has had less public vulnerability reports, and that Linux has had many more, but this is due to the nature of Open Source. Jeff does not include any "silently fixed" vulnerabilities that have been patched since Vista was released and Microsoft has not disclosed such vulnerabilities publicly. Here is a per section debunking of his paper broken down by topic, because I feel Jeff really needs to perform another less exaggerated analysis. "Window Vista - The First 6 Months" Let's remember that Vista was released to business partners earlier than home users. He does not account for this gap, and thus, this could soften the exposure of the official Vista code to many researchers for analysis. "Teredo" Teredo is also a major hole, and they are leaving it wide open. The community feels this is a flaw, but Microsoft doesn't seem to care. Also, the entire networking stack was rewritten for Vista, and that means lots of new bugs are present. I have already spoken to other researchers who have not disclosed such flaws publicly. However, a good start for learning about some is the Symantec paper that analyzed Vista during the BETA phases and revealed numerous issues. "Windows XP" Windows XP, touted as the most secure OS to date on release. Also, touted as secure in SP1, and again most secure in SP2. We are now seeing it again with Vista. Are we really supposed to believe that somehow this mantra is going to change just because Microsoft tells us so? In defense of Microsoft, however, they have focused their efforts to really clean things up, and that is commendable. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation" OK. The claims here are just plain insulting. The 100+ vulnerabilities include such software as PostgreSQL, MySQL, mailman, squid, and emacs. None of this software is installed in a default installation of RHEL4. I think the guy clicked on "Install Everything" and went to town with vulnerability reports :-) "RHEL4 Reduced Component List" This analysis more closely assimilates with Vista, but is still bloated in that many of the vulnerabilities he reports are very small bugs in Firefox, which don't result in a compromise of the host. Again, the nature of bug reporting in open versus closed source software. "Ubuntu" Again, the nature of open versus closed source bug reporting. However, even the kernel flaws reported are only relevant when such modules are loaded in the system and that surface is exposed. Again, the results are inflated, even in the "reduced" set. "Novell" More of the same. The vulnerabilities are shared between all the distros of course! "Mac OS X" Even though OS X claims to be secure, researchers have obviously shown that Apple will have flaws too. This is nature of software, and it affects all code. However, the paper claims that things like the vulnerability below are relevant... <snip> A bug in AFP Server when using an ACL-enabled storage volume may in certain situations result in an ACL remaining attached when a file with POSIX-only permissions is copied. </snip> "Putting It All Together" * insert nice graphs here * The conclusions that are drawn are built on a lack of understanding by the Microsoft researcher. I highly encourage him to go back and take another look, and pare down the results to essential information that is absolutely critical to the conclusions, rather than just "Other OS's have more bugs, see, look at my graphs"... -- Kristian Hermansen _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/ By Date By Thread Current thread: 6 Month Vista Vuln Report, Debunked Kristian Hermansen (Jun 26) Re: 6 Month Vista Vuln Report, Debunked Security Admin (NetSec) (Jun 26) <Possible follow-ups> 6 Month Vista Vuln Report, Debunked carl hardwick (Jun 29)

Kristian Hermansen (Jun 26)