COURSE PROJECT: OPERATING SYSTEM PROPOSAL

Course Project: Operating System Proposal

[Name of Organization]

Abstract

Recently, the increasing worldwide popularity of the various versions of the operating system Linux, are increasingly being used in both private business and government agencies. Competing operating systems exacerbates the conflict between the Linux window's community and supporters led by Microsoft. The parties cite many arguments in favour of “their” system, which is not always obvious which of them a marketing ploy, and what the result of an impartial investigation. So what do you choose? What criteria are used? One of the deciding factors when choosing an operating system how well does it provide information security. It is around comparing Linux and windows security has long serious passions boil.

Course Project: Operating System Proposal

Introduction

The first salvo in a war of windows and Linux was the report of forester research, which showed that windows more secure than Linux. Used for the comparison collected for the period 1 June 2002 to 31 may 2003 data on vulnerabilities in the protection for all windows platforms and all versions of Linux distributions from red hat and novel. As expected, the Linux community is not left in debt. Immediately after the publication of the report referred to therein Linux distributors have issued a joint statement in which it claimed that the forester research report is misleading, especially because it “erroneously considered all vulnerabilities as equal, regardless of the risk, which arises as a result of these vulnerabilities”.

And if it is important to maintain a list of vulnerabilities and counting their number, it is equally important to assess how quickly becoming available to users correction software vulnerabilities, both critical and less serious.

Despite some shortcomings, this reviews an informed opinion of an expert. As such, it will be useful to all those interested in the relative safety of the competing operating systems windows and Linux.

Discussion

In this paper a comparison is made among the windows and Linux from the values ??of the following parameters in the last 40 software corrections / vulnerabilities for Microsoft windows server 2003 and red hat enterprise Linux as v.3:

The severity of security vulnerabilities, which is assessed on the following parameters:

Possible damage (how great harm from the use of unpatched vulnerabilities in the OS?)

The ability to use (how easy it is to exploit the vulnerability?)

Exposure potential (what kind of access is required to exploit this vulnerability?)

The number of vulnerabilities, the seriousness of which is defined as critical.

The comparison results were not unexpected. Even by the low standards of subjective and applied Microsoft, at least 38% of the latest software corrections are designed to eliminate the gaps that Microsoft refers to critical. Only 10% of software corrections and warnings on red hat are, have a critical severity level. These results were obtained under conditions favourable to Microsoft and reasonably hard for red hat, since they are based on the criteria of Microsoft, and are not used by us for more stringent safety performance. If we apply our own criteria, the number of ...