Microsoft issues Vista security scorecard, gives itself an A-plus

Computerworld - A Microsoft Corp. executive yesterday said Windows Vista's first 90 days was a huge security success when compared with the opening three months of Windows XP, the current Apple Inc. Mac OS X and three flavors of Linux.

Jeff Jones, the strategy director in Microsoft's security technology unit, tallied up vulnerabilities patched during the first 90 days of Vista, XP, Mac OS X 10.4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

He gave Vista the checkered flag.

"Vista has an improved security vulnerability profile over its predecessor, and a significantly better profile relative to comparable modern competitive operating systems," Jones asserted in his blog. By his count, Vista has been hit by just one vulnerability since its introduction to enterprises at the end of November. The bug, which was in the antimalware scanning engine used by the bundled-with-Vista Windows Defender, was patched last month.

By comparison, said Jones, in their first 90 days, Windows XP was nailed with 14 bugs, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with 20, Red Hat with 137, Ubuntu with 71 and SuSE with 80.

Even when vulnerabilities that were disclosed but not patched are added in, Vista still comes out far ahead. Its five total bugs -- one patched, four made public but not fixed as of Feb. 28 -- compared favorably with XP's total of 18, Mac OS X's 27, Red Hat's 201, Ubuntu's 100 and SuSE's 111.

"As an early and tentative indicator, this is good news for Windows Vista security," said Jones in a report he issued of his findings (download PDF).

But simply counting up vulnerabilities, patched or not, doesn't tell the whole story, argued Oliver Friedrichs, senior director of Symantec Corp.'s security response team.

"The severity of [a] vulnerability plays into this, too," Friedrichs said today. "A single vulnerability that has a high severity could lead to the next Sasser or Blaster [worm], but an OS with a larger [bug] count, but with [ones rated] less high may be in a better defensive position overall."

Likewise, Friedrichs said, comparing Windows with any other operating system is always dicey because of the overwhelming market share Microsoft's products enjoy. That means flaws in Windows are much more likely to be exploited by attackers.

"A high-severity vulnerability may not receive widespread exploitation on another OS," Friedrichs said. "That's not uncommon. It doesn't diminish the criticality of the vulnerability itself, of course. For that vendor's customer base it does present a serious risk, but the overall risk to the Internet may not be much."

Friedrichs also questioned whether 90 days of Vista was an apples-to-apples comparison with XP or other operating systems, what with Vista's two-stage roll-out. "This [scorecard] started the day it shipped to enterprises, but they have a much much slower [Vista] adoption rate than consumers. The fact is, the installed base of Vista has not grown as quickly as did XP's in its first 90 days."