Bloody Blast32 got me...

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 1:41 pm

It's not purely a matter of more/less IP nodes running Windows or MacOS, Windows is flawed on the architecture level, which creates exploit possibilities that cannot be fixed unless you rewrite nearly everything. For example, there is no auth/checking when a window receives a message, so if there is a window running as Administrator user on the desktop, it is pretty trivial to send it some carefully constructed message to inject some custom code, and have the Administrator window create a nice little cmd.exe running as Administrator also. At that point, I've basically become administrator also. Oops. Wanna add authentification to the window message passing interface? You'll have to rewrite almost everything, and getting this new system to be compatible with current applications and libs isn't going to be very fun.

MacOSX is based on a BSD kernel, which is alot more secure (as it is benefiting from all advances in the different BSD flavors on that front) and also open source, (at least, I think, correct me if I'm wrong) which means you don't have to wait days/months for the company to release a patch, there is usually some user-made patch (that you can double-check for backdoors yourself if you are the paranoid type) released within hours.

Obviously, there's more stuff running on top of the kernel which can go wrong and permit exploits to be developped, but a nice stable, solid and secure kernel can help quite a bit.

If you look at a list of exploits/security alerts for all systems, you will see that the Windows security issues usually involve fairly fundamental stuff that will let any attacker become superuser trivially, without any user intervention even. This is a *whole lot less* easy to do with BSD and Linux (of course depends on the distrib and how it is configured by default,) given how they're built, and also because they actually let the use modify stuff by themselves code-wise, which doesn't happen with Windows.

Also as a last note on Windows, their crypto API is completely opened to the NSA . Microsoft released an NT4 Service Pack (I think it was SP4) with debug symbols still in there (oops), and among said symbols was a nice little one called NSAKEY (oops.) Obviously, the NSA probably has (pure speculation on my part here =P) the infrastructure to break just about any kind of encryption you can throw at it anyway, it's not too much of a big deal, but having a crypto API with single key that permits decryption of any and all messages without having to brute-force-crack it isn't exactly top notch security.

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 5:01 pm

I always use antivirus, but I was installing the OS, and when downloading some little something I needed, the beast got me, he!

Post by **hubird** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 5:21 pm

@Symbiote, yes, I remember Astroman said similar things lately, Windows' code being more vulnerable than mac's.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2005-03-25 17:22 ]</font>

BingoTheClowno · Post by **BingoTheClowno** » Fri Mar 25, 2005 5:42 pm

Maybe, if Linux will be able to support the vast expanse of hardware devices.
Just think about those little thumbnail USB drives, you don't even have to install a driver for it, Windows provides a generic one, it's called a HID driver or Human Interface Device. Or all the USB mice, most don't need a driver also.
In my oppinion, it is nice that MS has something to compete against and improve its bloatware, however it will be a miracle to muscle down a giant like MS that holds all the hardware manufacturers by the balls.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: BingoTheClowno on 2005-03-25 17:45 ]</font>