Wine Security Disclosure

[Dan Kegel]

dmitry at codeweavers.com wrote:
>  What's so special about Wine that doesn't apply to say VMWare,
>  Parallels, Win4Lin, DOSBox, and others?

With vmware, parallels, and win4lin, you can actually
run commercial virus scanners inside those environments,
and everybody knows that one should do that if one
cares about viruses.

With DOSBox, well, the target market for that tool is so small
compared to Wine it doesn't matter, they're mostly technical users,
and there isn't much ms-dos malware being written these days.

So Wine really is different; you can't run commercial virus
scanners in it, it's for users who aren't technical enough to
be able to find an antivirus solution on their own, and
(worst of all) everybody assumes Linux is impervious to viruses.

> Probably yes, we could extend  the FAQ section about
> security, but that's almost everything we can do.

I pointed out several other things we could do.
Another one is we could make the wine package list clamav
as a dependency.

Denying there's a problem, or that we can do anything about it,
might lead to a large number of unhappy users.
- Dan