What about these statements?
"We're not saying that Vista's network stack is going to be inherently insecure when it is released," Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at Symantec Security Response, said in an interview Monday. "Vista is one of the most important technologies that will be released over the next year, and people should understand the ramifications of a virgin network stack."
Friedrichs noted that in the Linux networking stack, vulnerabilities and stability issues continue to surface well over five years after it was first released.
Aside from security flaws, features supported by Vista's new networking technology could expose a PC running the operating system, according to Symantec's report.
For example, Vista will be the first Windows version to support IPv6, the next update of the technology standard used to send information over computer networks, by default. To help transition to the new protocol and for peer-to-peer networking features, Microsoft has functionality called IPv6 tunneling in Vista. This functionality could expose PCs that otherwise would be invisible behind a firewall, Symantec said.
"IPv6 and its accompanying transition technologies allow an attacker access to hosts on private internal networks outside of the (purview) of the administrator," the researchers wrote. As Vista becomes available, businesses should update security systems, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, to prevent that, they wrote.
The technology that underlies Vista's peer-to-peer collaboration features, much ballyhooed by Microsoft, could also pose a security threat, Symantec said. To provide these features, Microsoft has added support for serverless name-resolution protocols, such as Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP), that allow a Vista PC to operate in a network of Vista machines without a central server.
I?m glad to see that you point out the positive, but the report included the above and quite a bit of problems even prior to the release. They are not saying they won?t be fixed by launch time, but are concerned over the long run. Security patches can?t fix core components once deployed without a total rewrite of the original code. And you won?t be able to rewrite the code of it?s in deployment mode. According to the information listed, Symantec is expecting quite a few flaws to float past launch time and carry on maybe for years. It also stated that core components were removed to better secure the OS. The features most needed or wanted by IT won?t ship with Vista reducing it to nothing but a bloated XP OS.
When you transition from your existing Red Hat environment to SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, you can recognize dramatic cost savings, perhaps as much 50%
Read about top issues IT decision-makers face every day, plus get cost-effective solutions to real-life IT problems.
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
