Malware on Wine review

Marcel Partap mpartap at gmx.net
Mon Feb 23 19:14:20 CST 2009


> What about having to mark the exe as +x before Wine will load it? That's
> easilly doable frame any sane filemanager and provides a good level of
> safety..  and Wine already does a good job of making sure installed programs
> get +x.
Wow it actually does, never noticed that up to now :O
The problem would be with one of the more common use case: trying to 
start/install a program from an optical disc. The files will not be 
marked +x and the directories not be writable.
This problem scenario is also rather specific to WiNE; not an issue 
for KDE f.e. whcih yesterday had a related change committed: .desktop 
files have to be marked as executable to be run on click now. Lively 
discussion about that is still ongoing on kde-core-devel.

Despite from the install-from-cdrom issue, few users that have (been) 
switched from windows to linux will know how to chmod +x a file, so 
wine would at least have to give them a hint (or even a button) to do 
it. But once it becomes easy, they will just get used to clicking it 
and not be consciously pondering if the action is safe or not. So 
while i think it'd make sense, i doubt it is a practical solution to 
require files to have the executable bit.

Maybe a better solution would be to introduce an optional dependency 
on ClamAV and tight integration with it - known malware could be 
filtered and distributors would have greater interest in contributing 
to continuous  ClamAV signature updates..

regards marcel.



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