Apple's Leopard Versus Microsoft's Windows XP: Experimental Evaluation of Apple's Leopard Operating System with Windows XP-SP2 under Distributed Denial of Service Security Attacks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Apple's iMac computers are promoted by Apple Inc. to be secure, safe, virus free, and fast computers. In this experimental paper, we evaluate the security offered by the iMac with its usual Leopard Operating System, against different Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in a Gigabit LAN environment. We compared the effect of DDoS attacks on Leopard OS against those on the Window's XP-SP2 when installed on the same iMac platform under the same network attack environment. DDoS-based flooding attacks can originate in a LAN environment or can be from the Internet, which can have an impact on a victim computer with a barrage of Denial of Service (DoS) packet requests, thereby exhausting the resources of the victim computer in processing these requests. To study the impact on iMac computers, we created the corresponding DDoS traffic in a controlled lab environment to test against iMac computer that first deployed Leopard OS. Later, the same iMac platform was made to use Window's XP OS. We compared the behavior of Apple's Leopard OS with Windows's XP-SP2 OS under Ping Flood, ICMP Land, TCP-SYN, Smurf Flood, ARP Flood, and UDP Flood attacks. It was found that the Apple's iMac computer using its usual Leopard operating system crashed even under low bandwidth of ARP-based attack traffic, requiring forced reboot of the iMac computer. Interestingly, when compared with Microsoft's Windows XP-SP2 operating system, deployed on the same iMac platform, the computer was able to sustain the attack and did not crash. Our discovery of this vulnerability shows that Apple's popular operating systems, namely Leopards, commonly deployed on iMacs are prone to crash under ARP-based security attacks. Also in other attacks Windows XP-SP2 was found to have a better performance than Leopard in terms of resource consumption.