A quantitative model of operating system security evaluation

Abstract

Operating System (OS) as the root of trust for all applications running on the computer systems and plays an important role in information security. If the network or the software in application level that are executing on the operating system be unsecure, it is expected that OS as a defensive layer or in another words as the last defensive layer protects the security of information. In this paper, first, we extract and classify a vast spectrum of security features which has been used in multi-purposed OS, and then attribute them to three levels of low, medium and high. Our case study indicates how it is possible to evaluate OS security and specify the security level of an OS. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.