[Wine] Wine & Windows viruses

[David Gerard]

On 30 March 2010 10:48, Patrick70 <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:

> I have disabled the z:\ drive for Wine, but would like to know exactly how safe it is to keep this running.
> More particularly, would it be possible for malicious code to be injected via Wine even while I am surfing with the Ubuntu Firefox browser? And if so, what damage could it do?


As the FAQ notes, Wine doesn't sandbox programs in any meaningful
sense, even if you delete the link to the fake z:\ drive.

In normal use, Wine is best used for running essential programs you
just happen to need to move from Windows to Unix.

If you really want to test possible malware, the ZeroWine approach is
to run the prospective malware in Wine on Debian running in a QEMU
virtual machine - that way the toxic waste is sandboxed such that it
can't break free to the host system.

If you want reasonable isolation, you could run Wine and programs in
it in a separate Unix username - this will isolate things from your
main account. Note that this is very fiddly and tedious and you get to
do it all yourself ;-)


- d.