I have a complaint about the website
On the website there is an article that talks about homogenious populations being a threat to society and to the computer industry. Although I accept the fact that this is mostly true I believe that is a good argument for creating the Linux OS and other OS's not for creating wine. With the wine project you are bringing the homogenious population to the Linux community. So theoretically a virus could spread just as easily through a wine system as well as a Windows system. That virus could spread even if the security in Linux is in place. The wine installation could be affected and we have to reinstall the wine directory. I'd appreciate it if you guys would take that out of the website. I feel it hurts the credibility of your project by having it there. The fact is if a company has a wine installation they could have a large number of appications that could be affected by a virus. Wine running on a different system won't fix that. Although the security system in Linux could provide some security against accessing more vital parts of the system, the wine installation is still vulnerable due to the fact its implementing windows system calls. I have infact found viruses with Clam after installing wine. So I don't feel that this statement is true.
So theoretically a virus could spread just as easily through a wine system as well as a Windows system. That virus could spread even if the security in Linux is in place. The wine installation could be affected and we have to reinstall the wine directory.
Take a look at this. It's a good read: http://winehq.org/?issue=259#Wine%20&%20Viruses Hiji __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Philip V. Neves wrote:
On the website there is an article that talks about homogenious populations being a threat to society and to the computer industry. Although I accept the fact that this is mostly true I believe that is a good argument for creating the Linux OS and other OS's not for creating wine. With the wine project you are bringing the homogenious population to the Linux community. So theoretically a virus could spread just as easily through a wine system as well as a Windows system. That virus could spread even if the security in Linux is in place. The wine installation could be affected and we have to reinstall the wine directory.
I'd appreciate it if you guys would take that out of the website. I feel it hurts the credibility of your project by having it there. The fact is if a company has a wine installation they could have a large number of appications that could be affected by a virus. Wine running on a different system won't fix that. Although the security system in Linux could provide some security against accessing more vital parts of the system, the wine installation is still vulnerable due to the fact its implementing windows system calls.
I have infact found viruses with Clam after installing wine. So I don't feel that this statement is true.
Due to the current state of Wine, plus it's archjitechure, Even if a virus was found, it is much easier to remove. If the virus is a memory-resident kind, you can do pkill -9 wine as root or your user and shut down ile essentially killing said virus. A lot of viruses, in order to keep small, attempt to make fnction calls based on a DLL function absolute address. This has a 1 in 256 million cnahce in working, because each time you recodmile wine, the function entry points change. all that aill result in is a segmentation fault. sorry for my bad english i am not feeling well and it is affecting my corrdination, i can't walk right or type correctly. i can barely see the monitor, it's that bad.
On 3/27/06, Segin <segin2005(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Due to the current state of Wine, plus it's archjitechure, Even if a virus was found, it is much easier to remove.
If the virus is a memory-resident kind, you can do pkill -9 wine as root or your user and shut down ile essentially killing said virus.
A lot of viruses, in order to keep small, attempt to make fnction calls based on a DLL function absolute address. This has a 1 in 256 million cnahce in working, because each time you recodmile wine, the function entry points change. all that aill result in is a segmentation fault.
I agree that running viruses are much more difficult in Wine than in Windows, however, by default, Wine maps Z:\ to your entire Linux tree. If the user running Wine has write-access to any other folders in the Linux system tree and runs a virus which randomly deletes or modifies files on any accessible drive letter, that is still a problem. Plus, some users don't use "rm -rf .wine/" on a daily basis like most devs do, and they may actually store useful things under their .wine/ folder. In the (albeit, unlikely) event of "succesfully" running a Windows virus, those files are at risk. There are plenty of distros that install some version of Wine by default and automatically associate .exe's and the like with Wine, so users that aren't careful are still at risk. Granted, that risk is minimized by not being fully compatible with everything Windows does [yet], but it's still a risk.
Jason Green wrote:
On 3/27/06, Segin <segin2005(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Due to the current state of Wine, plus it's archjitechure, Even if a virus was found, it is much easier to remove.
If the virus is a memory-resident kind, you can do pkill -9 wine as root or your user and shut down ile essentially killing said virus.
A lot of viruses, in order to keep small, attempt to make fnction calls based on a DLL function absolute address. This has a 1 in 256 million cnahce in working, because each time you recodmile wine, the function entry points change. all that aill result in is a segmentation fault.
I agree that running viruses are much more difficult in Wine than in Windows, however, by default, Wine maps Z:\ to your entire Linux tree. If the user running Wine has write-access to any other folders in the Linux system tree and runs a virus which randomly deletes or modifies files on any accessible drive letter, that is still a problem. Plus, some users don't use "rm -rf .wine/" on a daily basis like most devs do, and they may actually store useful things under their .wine/ folder. In the (albeit, unlikely) event of "succesfully" running a Windows virus, those files are at risk.
There are plenty of distros that install some version of Wine by default and automatically associate .exe's and the like with Wine, so users that aren't careful are still at risk. Granted, that risk is minimized by not being fully compatible with everything Windows does [yet], but it's still a risk.
maybe if we put in a md5sum database of viruses and refuse to run those that are viruses? it's not as good as a real a/v app, but it's a start.
maybe if we put in a md5sum database of viruses and refuse to run those that are viruses?
You mean worms? Viruses modify existing files and thus it's pointless to check whole-file checksums. Signature checking has significant runtime impact (say a second just to get one .exe checked), so it's not something you'd want to do each time an .exe is about to be run. Then there are many variations of signature checks, as some virii are polymorphic and so on. I'd say it's best not to reinvent the wheel, and providing a false sense of security is pretty bad. The only real solution for the users is to run a virus scanner at regular intervals, and additionally to maybe run wine in a chroot jail (that's a packaging issue). Cheers, Kuba
Robert van Herk wrote:
sorry for my bad english i am not feeling well and it is affecting my corrdination, i can't walk right or type correctly. i can barely see the monitor, it's that bad.
Don't worry, probably it's just a virus.
Regards,
Robert
yeah, i think i got the karma-sutra or code-red when i hooked my brain to the internet.
On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Philip V. Neves wrote: [...]
Although I accept the fact that this is mostly true I believe that is a good argument for creating the Linux OS and other OS's not for creating wine. With the wine project you are bringing the homogenious population to the Linux community.
I agree with you that operating system diversity is only part of the equation, and that application diversity is important too. But even so I think Wine is good for diversity. * Promoting application diversity means promoting alternatives to the most popular Windows applications. That's a good argument for the development of, not Linux, but Firefox, Open Office, etc. But it does not mean that it is bad to run more obscure Windows applications, whether in Wine or on Windows, especially if they are alternatives to near Monopoly ones. In fact, running Open Office or WordPerfect Office on Windows is good for application diversity too. * There would be a good argument against Wine, from an application diversity point of view, if it was only meant to run monopoly applications. But this is not the case. While interest in getting popular Windows applications is inevitably higher than interest in getting obscure Windows applications running, Wine can and is used to run some fairly obscure Windows applications. My favorite example being MDL Chime<g> (http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name/?app_id=95). * Without Wine, anyone who needs a even a single Windows application has no choice but to run it on Windows. This reinforces the >90% operating system Windows monoculture. It also reinforces the Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger monocultures because if you're running Windows they're just there, so why not use them too? At least if you are running a Windows application on Linux, you are more likely to just run this one application you need in Linux and prefer native applications for the rest of your activities. And that's good for application diversity. * Viruses and worms don't just exploit application bugs. They also exploit security bugs in the OS libraries used by the applications. While Wine strives to be API compatible, being security-bug compatible has never been a goal and is not needed. Security-bug compatibility is not even likely as providing the same buffer overflows would require work and an intent to do so (though I'll grant you that security-bug-by-design issues are more likely to be replicated, *cough* EMF *cough*). So even running a monopoly application in Wine increases the ecosystem's diversity, if only a bit. * Finally, even if they manage to run in Wine, a lot of Windows malware will see their nastiness greatly reduced. For instance, on Windows, keyboard loggers arrange to be started at boot time. On Linux they will not be started until you start Wine, and even then, only if we ever decide to simulate a Windows boot before starting any Windows application. In other words, even once installed, a Windows keyboard logger would essentially never be run in a Wine environment. Similarly, Windows rootkits would only be able to hide themselves and their payload from other Windows applications, not from the Unix user. In effect this means they would fail to 'work as advertised' (i.e. hide from the user) even if they did run properly in Wine. And that's a big if: since rootkits mostly work by patching the Windows kernel it is highly unlikely that they would ever manage to run at all in the first place. -- Francois Gouget <fgouget(a)free.fr> http://fgouget.free.fr/ Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
participants (7)
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Francois Gouget -
Hiji -
Jason Green -
Kuba Ober -
Philip V. Neves -
Robert van Herk -
Segin