Windows Vista - Is It Really Secure?

In just the first six months of general availability, Windows Vista - Microsoft's most secure Windows platform to date - pushed in excess of 60 million licenses worldwide, out of which the Redmond company is ready to confirm no less than 40 million actually sold copies. This means that Vista now accounts for the second largest install base in the world following Windows XP, and it's also Microsoft's ticket to 1 billion Windows based machines by mid 2008. One of the main aspects of the operating system, touted repeatedly in Microsoft's Wow marketing campaign is the security of the new Windows operating system.

During his address at the Financial Analyst Meeting 2007, Kevin Turner Microsoft Chief Operating Officer revealed that Vista was designed from the ground up with security and reliability in mind. The operating system is Microsoft's first software product to go through the Secure Development Lifecycle. The SDL is a sum of techniques, practices and guidelines applied directly to the process of software development, designed to bulletproof the code. "Security has assumed its proper place in the software development process: a natural consequence of designing, writing and testing code. The next step in this evolution will be when we stop talking about the SDL and simply call it software development," stated James A. Whittaker, Security Architect at Microsoft. "Security has assumed its proper place in the software development process: a natural consequence of designing, writing and testing code. The next step in this evolution will be when we stop talking about the SDL and simply call it software development."

Turner claims that Windows Vista had just 12 vulnerabilities in the first half year on the market. This is half the number of security flaws featured by XP in the same period. And the figure is important to remember, because this is actually Microsoft's target with Vista security, code quality that will deliver no more than half the number of vulnerabilities its predecessor had. Still, Turner could not avoid commenting on the fact that Mac OS X Tiger and the major distributions of Linux had more security vulnerabilities than Vista. But the threat environment for Tiger and Linux is as well as inexistent. And with a share of just 5.41% of the operating system market, Vista enjoys a similar obscurity as the two rival operating systems. With the vast majority of threats focused on Windows XP, and with the security mitigations added or enhanced in Vista - including the Windows Security Center, the User Account Control, Windows Defender, Kernel Patch Protection, or PatchGuard, mandatory driver signing, Windows Firewall and Internet Explorer 7 - Microsoft's latest platform is indeed the safest Windows operating system available.