Windows Vista Network Attack Surface Analysis

A broad analysis was performed on the network-facing components of the Microsoft Windows Vista release version. Our analysis explore show it affects network security and how it differs from previous versions of Microsoft Windows.

Windows Vista features are written network stack, which introduces a number of core behavior changes. Windows Vista also introduces a number of new protocols, most importantly IPv6, its supporting protocols, and several IPv4 to IPv6 transition protocols.

As a client operating system, Windows Vista will be widely deployed and as such is an important topic for security research. We studied the following protocols and technologies : LLTD, IPv4, IPv6, Teredo, TCP, SMB2 named pipes, MS-RPC, and the Windows Firewall.

We also studied ARP, NDP, IGMP, MLD, ICMPv6, and UDP.