Microsoft vs. Apple: Resilience against Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

Both Microsoft´s Windows 7 and Apple´s Snow Leopard operating systems claim to provide users with a safer and more reliable environment, but no work has evaluated and compared their resilience against common DDoS attack traffic. The authors compare the effect of this type of attack traffic on both systems installed on the same iMac hardware platform under the same network attack conditions. In particular, they consider common DDoS traffic at different layers of the TCP/IP protocol stack-namely, ARP flood, ping flood, and TCP-SYN flood attacks, which correspond to layers 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Interestingly, the iMac computer with its native Snow Leopard system was found to exhaust more computing resources when compared to that of Windows 7 installed on the same platform and under the same attack conditions.