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I'm trying to understand what are the security implications/consequences of installing Wine. Does installing wine means that my Linux OS will be prone to "Windows" type of viruses and malware as well?

PS1: Wine is an implementation of Windows APIs for Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X - and therefore my concern.

PS2: I wanted to run Evernote that is why I'm considering installing wine.

Raphael Ahrens
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Fawix
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2 Answers2

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WINE is, as you said, an implementation of Windows APIs for *Nix systems. That means that it only runs programs that you directly tell it to run. The basic syntax for WINE (once it's installed of course) is wine programName.exstension, so if you wanted to run Evernote 5.9.1.8742, then you would cd into the directory that Evernote is in and type wine Evernote_5.9.1.8742.exe to run it.

Implications

What this essentially means is that any windows malware needs to be executed to work, so if you download a corrupted version of someProg that in turn downloads and executes someMalware, then nothing would happen. The reason being is that instead of executing someMalware like Windows, for the malware to work it would need to be initiated by WINE, and therefore by you. Installing WINE does not open your computer up to any "Windows malware" because you are directly in control of what exes, bats, and coms WINE executes. The only theoretical danger is if you download a Linux program that downloads a windows virus, and then calls WINE to execute that virus, and then fixes everything to work out of the WINE sandbox.

In the long run, your Linux computer is completely safe with WINE. The only real danger is what you install, which in your case is Evernote. If you get Evernote off of the official site and just run it with wine Evernote_5.9.1.8742.exe (if it's that version), then you will be completely fine.

Community
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Wine allows you to run (some) Windows executables on your Linux box. They could be corrupted, but any malware distributed that way will have a hard time to do it's job: The known Windows infrastructure (registry, system programs, many facilities) just isn't there. Sure, it can reach the user's files (other Windows programs, data files) and corrupt those, but a system-wide infection is very unlikely (it would require a payload targetting your specific Linux installation --they are much more varied than Windows ones-- as part of a Windows malware).

vonbrand
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