Abstract—Windows 7 is a personal computer operating system
developed by Microsoft Corporation, and it belongs to
Windows NT family. This paper concentrates on the topic of
analyzing the security level of Windows 7 Operating System,
and security level of the information system highly depends on
the operating system. To estimate the security grade of
Windows 7 operating system, we use the graph model to
describe the relationships between vulnerabilities. In the
proposed graph model, AND Structure and OR Structure are
exploited. To testify the performance of the proposed security
evaluation method, we collect 1358 Windows vulnerabilities to
construct a dataset. In our experiment, Windows 98, Windows
2000, Windows XP and Windows 7 are utilized, and three
different types of user are applied, that is, distributed users,
trusted users, and regular users. Experimental results
demonstrate that Window 7 achieve higher security level than
the former Windows version.
Keywords- Security problem, Windows 7, Operating system,
Graph model.
I. INTRODUCTION
With the rapid development of computer and network
technology, information security has been a crucial problem
in computer security management. Furthermore, security
level of the information system highly depends on the
operating system[1][2]. Thus, evaluating security of the
operating system is of great importance for information
security and operating system research. Operating system
refers to a kind of basic software which can solve the
computer hardware directly[3][4]. The security level of
operating system denotes the basic element of other
application software securities. Without this safe foundation,
application systems and security systems cannot satisfy
some basic guarantee. In the environment of the network,
the security highly depends on each host computer system
in it. Without security of the operating system, there are no
securities of host computer systems. Hence, the security of
operating system significantly affects all the computer
system[5].
Along with the important information networks
interconnected with Internet (such as the finance,
government affairs, commercial affairs, and Internet),
computer operating system has played an important role in
politics and economy management. At the same time, the
above important information network systems should tackle
the threats of hacker’s invasion[7][8]. In recent years,
Internet is widely exploited in contemporary social fife, and
then people pay more and more attentions to the security
problem of operating system. Moreover, operating system is
regarded as a bridge between hardware and upper layer
software, and security of operating system is a crucial
component of the entire information security system[9].
In order to avoid network threat and attack, we should
propose effective security mechanism to protect and defend
network threats. A good operating system should present
enough safe protection to the information resources, and
then prevent the abuse of the unauthorized users[10][11]. In
this paper, we aim to study on the security problem in
windows 7 operating system.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
illustrates Overview of Microsoft Windows 7. In section 3,
we propose a method to evaluate the security of windows 7
operating system. Section 4 gives experimental results and
related analysis. Finally, the conclusions are drawn in
section 5.
II. OVERVIEW OF MICROSOFT WINDOWS 7
Windows 7 refers to a personal computer operating
system developed by Microsoft Corporation, and it belongs
to a part of the Windows NT family of operating systems.
In particular, Windows 7 was released to the software
market at 22 July 2009. Furthermore, Windows 7 is
designed and implemented to be an incremental upgrade to
the former Windows version - Windows Vista, and strongly
maintains its hardware and software compatibility.
Windows 7 continued improvements user interface with the
addition of a redesigned taskbar.
On the other hand, some new features are introduced in
Windows 7, such as libraries, and a new file sharing system.
Particularly, a new Action Center is proposed to give an
overview of system security and maintenance information.
In Windows 7, some stock applications are updated, such as
Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Player, and Windows
Media Center and so on. Different from Windows Vista,
Windows 7 performs better than its former version. In
general, Windows 7 is a successful product for Microsoft.