Short answer: no practical danger yet, but read on for a better way...

What's this ptrace thing anyway?

this is due to a bug in the Ubuntu kernel that prevents ptrace and WINE playing well together.

• No, ptrace protection is a deliberate kernel security measure first introduced around Ubuntu 10.10. It's not a bug, and so isn't going to be "fixed".




• In simple terms, the default ptrace_scope value of 1 blocks one process from examining and modifying another process unless the second process (child) was started by the first process (parent).




• This can cause problems with some programs under Wine because of the way wineserver provides "Windows Services" to these programs.

What are the risks in setting ptrace_scope to 0?

• This restores the old behavior where one process can "trace" another process, even if there is no parent-child relationship.




• In theory, a piece of malware can use this to harm you/your computer; e.g. it can attach to Firefox and log all of your URLs/passwords, etc. In practice this is extremely unlikely unless you blindly install binary debs from random sites, etc.




• As far as debugging goes, the 0 settings is in fact required for gdb, strace, etc. to attach to non-children unless you run them with elevated privileges (sudo).

What are the problems with the workaround?

• The workaround is somewhat problematic because ptrace_scope is a global value, and while it's set to 0, all processes on your system are exempt from the non-child restriction.


• If you use the workaround, put it in a simple bash script that enables it, runs your Windows program and then disables (sets to 1) on exit.
  
  
  
  • DO NOT make ptrace_scope world-writable (666) as the forum post recommends -- that is a huge security risk because now any process can change it at will!
  
  

Is there a better solution?

• A better solution which is more secure and does not require repetitively modifying ptrace_scope is to grant Wineserver ptrace capabilities.

  
  
  
  
  

  • In a terminal:

    
    
    

    
    
    sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin 
    
    sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/bin/wineserver
    
    sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /usr/bin/wine-preloader
    
    

  
  

  • This exempts the wineserver and wine-preloader binaries from the non-child ptrace restriction, and allows them to ptrace any process.

  
  
  • It only needs to be done once, and is safer because these binaries are usually from a trusted source - the official repositories or the official Wine PPA, so they aren't going to be malware.
  
  

If you're using Crossover

Install libcap2:

sudo apt-get install libcap2-bin;

Then, add an exception for Crossover:

sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /opt/cxoffice/bin/wineserver;

sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=eip /opt/cxoffice/bin/wine-preloader;

Finally, add its libraries to ld.so.conf (or you will get "error while loading shared libraries: libwine.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"):

echo /opt/cxoffice/lib/ | sudo tee /etc/ld.so.conf.d/crossover.conf

sudo /sbin/ldconfig