Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has given a detailed breakdown of his company`s security strategy.
In a statement published on Wednesday on the Microsoft site, Gates, who is also the company`s chief software architect, detailed a number of updates for Windows XP in its Server Pack 2, and for Windows Server and Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004.
While Gates` newsletter details the company`s overall strategy, including its co-operation with law enforcement agencies, there was no mention of the prospect of an immediate public alert of a vulnerability that many users of Microsoft products would like to see.
Gates also mentions anti-spam tools such as SmartScreen technology that can be trained to filter out unwanted e-mails and the implementation of "Caller-ID" that can authenticate the origin of e-mail.
Home computers that can be connected to the corporate network will also come under increased security scrutiny. Gates says technologies are being developed to inspect these remote devices and block network access if they don`t pass "a health inspection".
To make computers more resilient to increasingly sophisticated worms and viruses, Microsoft is investing in the development of an integrated set of protection technologies. These include system protection that proactively adjusts defences on each computer based on changes in its "state", behaviour blocking that limits the ability of a computer infected by a worm or virus to cause further damage, and application-aware firewall and intrusion prevention that is designed to identify malicious traffic and block it.
Software updates have been the main way to combat security vulnerabilities, and Gates says the company is continuing to make significant upgrades to the quality of the updates and associated processes.
This includes releasing updates on a monthly basis to improve predictability and manageability, and improving testing to minimise update inconsistencies. Most updates will soon have full rollback capabilities.
Other security enhancements will include password complexity, and the ability to support smart cards and biometric ID cards.
Gates says the quality of Microsoft`s products is improving, citing the lower number of security bulletins that have been issued.
The number of "critical" or "important" security bulletins issued for Windows Server 2003, compared to Windows 2000 Server, dropped from 40 to nine in the first 320 days each product was on the market. Similarly, for SQL Server 2000, there were three bulletins issued in the 15 months after release of Service Pack 3, compared to 13 bulletins in the 15 months prior to its release. With Exchange 2000 SP3, there was just one bulletin in the 21 months after its release, compared to seven bulletins in the 21 months prior to that.
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