ANALYSIS OF OPERATING SYSTEM VULNERABILITIES: A CASE STUDY OF ANDROID AND WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM

ABSTRACT

With the current innovation in information technology, users carries out their daily activities either with a personal computer or a mobile phone. These devices are vulnerable to attacks and needed to be secured. This paper focuses on the security mechanics of mobile and computer operating systems. Android operating system for mobile operating systems and Windows operating system for computer system were used as case study. The research method involve the use of percentage ratio to analyse the vulnerability of each operating system. The result shows that the highest vulnerability in the Windows operating system is elevation of privilege (44%), followed by remote coded execution (27%), and tampering (0.5%) is the lowest vulnerability in the Windows operating system. The study also identified Trojan attacks as the most common type of attack in the Android operating system, accounting for 38.10%, followed by file infectors at 29.30%, and riskware as the least common type of attack in the Android operating system, accounting for 3%. It was discovered in this paper that portable executable (PE) malware represented the largest category of detected threats in windows operating system and the malware category is mostly common in android operating systems amongst adware, risk ware and potentially unwanted applications (PUAs). This study contributes to scientific research and development in relation to the SDG goals.

Index Terms:

Android, Operating System, Security Mechanism, Threats, Windows,