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 been at the center of a week"s worth of controversy about the security of Apple"s operating system. In an e-mail interview with Computerworld, Dai Zovi talked about how finding vulnerabilities is like fishing, the chances that someone else will stumble on the still-unpatched bug, and what operating system — Windows Vista or Mac OS X — is the sturdiest when it comes to security.
From your research on both platforms, is there a winner between Mac OS X 10.4 and Vista on security?
"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 methodologies."
Full interview at source.