Hi,
My wife and I have been receiving a lot of .EXE attachment files
lately. Since we both run linux this is inconvenient, and even if we
did read our mail in Windows it is just plain stupid to blindly run
these programs people are sending!
So I lashed together a script, vmware_view, that uses vmware-mount.pl to
mount a win95.dsk vmware virtual disk file, copies the files/attachments
to C:\INCOMING, unmounts it, and then launches vmware to boot the
virtual disk.
One can then run the .EXE (or whatever) file inside the vmware VM.
When vmware exits, the script copies a "clean" backup copy of win95.dsk
(and config files) over the "tainted" ones.
Since I do not have networking enabled in the win95 VM, I can't see how
a Windows virus or worm can possibly "get out" and do any damage to my
or any one else's system. The only "virtual devices" I have connected
to the VM are the floppy and sound.
The only thing I can think of being affected by is a CPU or HD denial
of service attack, which likely can be easily stopped by killing the
vmware process. I'm not worried about a *direct* attack against vmware,
e.g. buffer overrun, (or even against my script for that matter), since
these are currently very low probability.
It is strangely refreshing to run Win9* knowing that now matter what
happens the partition is to be blown away upon shutdown. It does
take vmware takes about 2 minutes to boot Win95, which I imagine is
unacceptable by today's "instant gratification" standards. It's not
a problem for me, I have vmware iconify itself and I do something else
while it is booting. As a bonus: I replaced "The Microsoft Sound.wav"
with a file "moo.wav". So when it moo's I know it's ready ;-)
Anyway, a couple of questions:
Have I missed any holes?
If this sort of script hasn't been done before, and anyone out there
is interested in helping design and implement a general use script
that creates this vmware sandbox, please get in touch with me.
Best regards,
Karl
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