[lug] Emulation vulnerabilities?

Keith C. Herold herold at cslr.Colorado.EDU
Wed Sep 26 21:41:13 MDT 2001


Well, except that someone clever might be able to intercept logins, etc.
launched from within the Wine client.  It seems to me that the big danger is
the same:  as a part-time windows, part-time linux user, I tend to rely on
my linux machine to stay relatively secure (compared to windows), with
updates, etc. applied.  If I ever finally make the big switch (if linux ever
plays all the games I want to play :) ), it would distress me somewhat if
while using whatever legacy windows apps I still need (there are only a few
linguistics field research tools out there, and the best one is a vb
program), I took a vulnerability and ate something vital that was vulnerable
through wine.

Whew!  Long sentence!

In any case, how much access does Wine have?  What if, for example, it runs
as me (does it?) and a clever script writer looks for ssh keys?  Remote
possibility, but still...

--Keith

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us]On
> Behalf Of Prescott Oelke
> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 9:26 PM
> To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
> Subject: RE: [lug] Emulation vulnerabilities?
>
>
> If you are talking about Word macro viruses and the like then yes, Wine
> "works" with them (i.e. the virus functions correctly). As far as
> VBScript viruses and stuff of that nature, I know for a fact that a lot
> of them don't function properly for whatever reason (I have opened
> infected e-mails purposely to test this out of curiosity). At this point
> though I can't think of any reason why a well written one wouldn't work
> within Wine. But I can't really see what damage that could do except to
> the files within the emulated environment (after all if the virus
> "thinks" it's in Windows it probably wouldn't know how to deal with a
> Linux file setup).
>
> Prescott
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us]
> On Behalf Of Keith C. Herold
> Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 8:30 PM
> To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
> Subject: [lug] Emulation vulnerabilities?
>
> So I have an entirely naive question to ask:
>
> Does the fact that Wine emulates windows, and will allow users to run
> MSOffice within the Linux environment, make the machine vulnerable to
> the
> various Outlook email viruses out there?
>
> I know that Wine is fairly temperamental (sp?), but it occurred to me
> that
> if the software actually emulates within a pseudo environment, it might
> be
> possible to get an email virus to run correctly, even though in theory
> the
> linux security architecture (well, permissions, etc) would otherwise
> stop
> similar attacks (although not actual maliscious VB scripts I hope! :).
>
> Anyone have any idea about this?
>
> --Keith
>
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