Symantec has reported a number of vulnerabilities in Windows Vista in its third report on the new OS. Although the two companies are partners, Symantec is now in direct competition with Microsoft following the latter's move into the anti-virus space.
Matthew Conover, principal security researcher at Symantec, said in the
report that although the overall security of the OS kernel has increased
dramatically over XP, "we have identified certain weaknesses in the
kernel enhancements that may be leveraged by malicious code to undermine
these improvements".
Conover claims the PatchGuard feature, which checks the integrity of key
parts of the kernel code, can be disabled. His other concern is that
attackers could force dangerous unsigned driver software to run by
patching core OS files. The same feature has already been attacked by
security researchers at Black Hat.
Microsoft says the report, "Assessment of Windows Vista Kernel-Mode
Security", which focuses on build 5365 of Vista, a 64-bit version
released in April, is old news, as most of the issues have been dealt
with in later versions. Vista is the company's successor OS to XP, and
is set to go on general release in January.