Lawrence and Christine Family Blog

"Many millions of words have been written and said on this topic. The basic argument goes like this. In its long evolution, Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure. Well these images make the point very well".

The attached image represent a map of system calls that occur when a web server serves a single HTML page with a picture. The same page and picture have been used on both servers for the purpose of testing. A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications.

The resulting images were generated by Sana Security. The first image is of the system calls that occur on a Windows server running IIS; while the second is of a Linux Server running Apache. The images speak for themselves.

Posted in: Technology on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 at