$10K hack challenge winner says Vista’s code more secure than Mac’s
Vista’s security code is much better than the Mac’s, according to the winner of the $10K hack challenge.
Dino Dai Zovi, the New York-based security researcher who took home $10,000 in a highly-publicized MacBook Pro hijack on April 20, has recently been interviewed by ComputerWorld in an e-mail.
When he was asked this particular question: From your research on both platforms, is there a winner between Mac OS X 10.4 and Vista on security?
His reply was “I have found the code quality, at least in terms of security, to be much better overall in Vista than Mac OS X 10.4. It is obvious from observing affected components in security patches that Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) has resulted in fewer vulnerabilities in newly-written code. I hope that more software vendors follow their lead in developing proactive software security development methodologiesâ€.
Ironically, Windows animated (.ANI) cursor sneaked into Vista despite SDL.
Michael Howard, an authority on Microsoft’s SDL — posted an extensive entry on the brand-new SDL blog that outlined lessons learned from the ANI vulnerability.
“SDL is not perfect, nor will it ever be perfect,” Howard acknowledged Thursday. “We still have work to do, and this bug shows that.”
SDL maybe a good thing, but obviously, it still is not enough to spot entirely the software security development vulnerability.
Dino Dai Zovi’s opinion that Vista offers better security may be debatable, especially with the report that the Dai Zovi’s hack has been confirmed by TippingPoint to affect Internet Explorer running on Vista.
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Wax.