Why must the user be the owner of the WINEPREFIX dir?

[Gabriel Sailer]

Hello,
after an update of wine on my Debian etch i got the error:

libwine: Refuse to use a WINEPREFIX dir owned by a different user.

I found that there is a patch in Wine release 0.9.49 but i did not found
why this patch is needed. Are the linux access rights not secure enough?
I have the full access of the directory and all subdirectories and files.

I used the same WinXX Application with wine for a few people (not
parallel but serialized) in the same group and gave the WINEPREFIX dir
(and all subdirectories and files) to this group.

Is it really nesseccary to use this protection? Did i get a security hole
without the check?

Many thanks for your help

Gabriel Sailer

[Alexandre Julliard]

Gabriel Sailer  writes:
> I used the same WinXX Application with wine for a few people (not
> parallel but serialized) in the same group and gave the WINEPREFIX dir
> (and all subdirectories and files) to this group.
>
> Is it really nesseccary to use this protection? Did i get a security hole
> without the check?

It's because when you have several users sharing a prefix directory
you'll most likely run into trouble. In particular it catches people
running as root inside a user's dir, which breaks things. If you are
sure that you have taken care of all the potential trouble, you can work
around the check by creating a prefix dir for each user and symlinking
things inside it to a central place.