How is UNIX OS more protecive?

Answer 1

Windows was built as a single-user system and is a "Johnny-come-lately" to internet computing. They need to stay backward compatible with old Windows applications and old-style closed LAN networking, which is why they leave ports dangling open, for instance.

Whereas Unix was designed from the ground up as a secure multiuser server OS, and the Internet was *invented* on Unix.

Also, Unix has become "Open source" in its Linux and BSD variants, which means lots of people have gone through the source code, and everyone's empowered to fix bugs if they find them.

Answer 2

*nices such as the BSD's, Plan 9, Linux, Mac OS X, etc. are true multitasking and multiuser systems. They can have multiple screens and keyboards or virtual ones each of whom can have a seperate user logged on and running many programs. UNIX has very strong permissions. If a file is created by one user no other user except the user and root(the super user) can change that file. Root is the main user that can do anything on the computer. however, most *nices do not encourage you to run as root. modern ones like Ubuntu don't even allow you to run as root. in those versions all root access has to go through the sudo command.

In Unix, programs cannot exert complete control over the system there is always a way to kill a program by using the killall -s SIGKILL program-name or the kill -s SIGKILL pid commands. No program run by a normal user can affect the system. A normal(non-root) user can go to the / directory and do rm -r(remove everything in the director) and nothing will happen because s/he doesn't have priveleges to do that. Root however can which is why you should never run as root.

Programs also cannot execute code in other programs. In windows, a program can call CreateRemoteThread and actually run another program which means you can take control of it.

Also because of the unix permission model when a user downloads a virus, the virus is not able to bring the system down, becuase the virus can only read(not write) system files. all other users are unaffected.

In fact there was a virus for unix called Bliss. It was so unsuccessful because no one actually ran it as root. In the end, the writer released the source code and people study it to see a good attempt at a unix virus, which is very difficult to write.

Another plus about unix, is that it is not alway binary compatable. This means that a program for linux won't run on most other *nices and it probably won't work in another version of linux.

i hope this is a comprehensive list of why unix is more secure. Unix is used on about every single web server out there. there are probably more unix computers in the world than windows. Yet, even though they are the most important servers in the world, holding up the internet, they are never attacked simply because the program can't run with permissions to modify the operating system itself. This also proves the fact that windows does not get more viruses because it is used more. Unix servers are used even more and they are much more important.