[Discuss] What do typical Linux users do WRT protecting their systems from malware

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (Dan Ritter)]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 08:44:52PM -0400, MBR wrote:
> On 7/20/2011 8:01 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> > Macintosh is a much harder target than Windows/NT simply because of 
> > the OS architecture. Similarly, Linux is a harder target than Windows 
> > for reasons similar to Macintosh.
> Besides the fact that users generally aren't logged in as root, what 
> other aspects of the Unix/Mac/Linux architecture make Unix a harder 
> target than Windows?

There is a long-standing class of vulnerabilities in Windows
related to the close coupling of the graphics driver, the
kernel, and the application interface. As a result, it's usually
trivial for any code to escalate privileges and gain complete
control.

More recently, the decision to pull many of the IE browser
components into the general graphics interface has meant that
code from the net -- JavaScript, PDF, etc. -- has also had an
easy time escalating privileges.

And Microsoft only started thinking of security as a priority in
the last five or six years. Prior to that, it wasn't even on the
nominal checklist.

I'll also dare to suggest that the closed-source nature of
Windows meant that the OS programmers felt a much more profound
faith in security by obscurity than was ever justified.

Microsoft applications divisions -- Word, Excel, and the rest of
the Office moneymakers -- made decisions impacting the OS.
Sometimes they used function calls that were not documented for
anyone else's perusal. Features generally took priority over
anything else.

By way of contrast, most Unixoid systems have relatively few big
apps running on top, and those are almost universally written
with an eye towards portability. The division of code between
kernel and system and application is much clearer, and
subsystems are expected to work in isolation, and are frequently
replaceable. There's more competition among DHCP clients in
Linux, for instance, because the market doesn't even exist
elsewhere.

-dsr-


-dsr-



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