Wine being targeted for adware

[Austin English]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Nicholas LaRoche <nlaroche at vt.edu> wrote:
> Austin English wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 7:23 PM, Eduardo Menezes
>> <companheiro.vermelho at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think a "isolate prefix" option in winecfg (or even winetricks) would
>>> be
>>> very useful.
>>> Undoing symlinks and editing the registry to take out the reference to
>>> the
>>> root is boring (and I'm not sure only doing this is entirely safe) and
>>> this
>>> kind of option would make it possible to run untrusted software without
>>> worrying.
>>> I even ran some malwares in isolated wine prefixes and used diff to see
>>> what
>>> it did. Learned a lot from this.
>>> Anyway, a "nice to have" feature.
>>>
>>> Best wishes and thanks for this amazing software,
>>>
>>> 2009/1/14 <wine-devel-request at winehq.org>
>>>>
>>>> Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:07:06 -0500
>>>> From: Nicholas LaRoche <nlaroche at vt.edu>
>>>> Subject: Re: Wine being targeted for adware
>>>> To: Stefan D?singer <stefan at codeweavers.com>
>>>> Cc: wine-devel at winehq.org
>>>> Message-ID: <496E45EA.9060603 at vt.edu>
>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>>>>
>>>> Stefan D?singer wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> As long as the facilities exist for keeping an entire wine bottle
>>>>>> isolated from other bottles (and ~/) I don't see this being a major
>>>>>> issue.
>>>>>
>>>>> They don't.
>>>>>
>>>>> Even if you don't have a drive link pointing out of a bottle, a Windows
>>>>> app
>>>>> running in Wine can still call Linux syscalls(int 0x80). This is
>>>>> possible/needed because Windows apps run as a regular Linux process
>>>>> that
>>>>> links in Linux libraries which perform linux syscalls.
>>>>>
>>>>> So any Windows malware can break out of the Wine "sandbox"(which isn't
>>>>> a
>>>>> sandbox really) by simply using linux syscalls.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> On more recent distros (FC9/10) SELinux is enabled by default. Rolling a
>>>> policy specifically for an untrusted bottle would severely limit the
>>>> damage it could do. It could restrict all unnecessary read/write/execute
>>>> access outside of the ~/.wine folder for wineserver and the program.
>>>>
>>>> I see your point though, since none of the aforementioned security
>>>> precautions are commonplace or specifically targeted to wine.
>>>>
>>> --
>>> Eduardo
>>> "Toda Revolução é IMPOSSÍVEL até que se torne INEVITÁVEL!!!" (Leon
>>> Trotsky)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Windows doesn't provide this, why would wine?
>>
>> P.S., please bottom post on wine mailing lists.
>>
>
> The vanilla wine distribution probably wouldn't have it due to it being low
> priority. That doesn't necessarily preclude a patch set from being created
> that adds that functionality. There are definite advantages to being able to
> override what an application can access or modify.
>
> Any patches could always be pulled into the official repository if it became
> a higher priority down the road.

Of course, Wine is open source, so if someone wants to edit it for
that purpose, by all means, do so. I'm not sure that Wine _should_ do
so though, at least, not now. Networking on a per app basis I can see
an argument for, since Windows Firewall is now included and provides
such a feature.

>>> Windows doesn't provide this, why would wine?
>
> See ReactOS for a clone of windows. Wine users should at least have the
> option of patching in additional security features.

Again, they can do as they wish, but that doesn't mean it needs to be
in vanilla wine.

-- 
-Austin