Microsoft: Vista more secure than XP and open source

Windows
Vista was hit by significantly fewer publicly disclosed security flaws in
its first year than Windows
XP and open source rivals in their first years, according to a report from
Microsoft.

The report, written by Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in Microsoft's
Trustworthy Computing group, is part of Microsoft's effort to show that its
work on redesigning the security architecture and adding new security features
to Vista have paid off.

Jones also found that changes to the way Microsoft handles patching has resulted
in less work for system administrators on Vista compared to Windows XP.

The report comes on the heels of figures from Secunia, which reported fewer
vulnerabilities for Windows in 2007 compared to open source operating systems
in the same time period. However, Microsoft's report compares the way each OS
fared in its first full year of supported distribution.

Comparisons between different types of operating systems on the basis of numbers
of public bug reports are often downplayed by security experts, who say they
are only part of the picture. For instance, Linux-based OSs are composed mainly
of third-party components whose bug reports are all known publicly, whereas
third-party components play a small part in Windows and many bugs may be uncovered
but not made public.

However, Microsoft's main interest with the new report is in convincing users
that Vista - which has received heavy criticism over bugs and usability issues
- is more secure and more easily managed than XP.

"The results of the analysis show that Windows Vista has an improved security
vulnerability profile over its predecessor," said Jones in the report.
"Analysis of security updates also shows that Microsoft improvements to
the security update process and development process have reduced the impact
of security updates to Windows administrators significantly compared to its
predecessor."

In its first year Microsoft released 17 security bulletins and patches affecting
Vista, compared to 30 for XP in its first year, Jones said.

Microsoft fixed 36 bugs in Vista compared to 65 in XP, and there remained 30
unpatched bugs in Vista, compared to 54 for XP in their first years.

The number of vulnerabilities fixed in Mac
OS X and in Linux-based operating systems was higher in their first years,
Jones said: 360 in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation, 224 in Ubuntu
6.06 LTS and 116 in Mac OS X 10.4.

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