Forgive my stupid question :
If I I run virus infected game under dosbox can i be sure that this not thrash my hdd if virus is supposed to do so ?
Interesting question 😁. Well, I'm sure a virus cannot crash your hdd under dosbox (some viruses I think actually sent some broken IDE commands which slammed the heads against the platter) or overwrite your cmos since it does not have direct access to the hardware. But I guess some filesystem corruption could be done since files created/deleted inside dosbox will be created/deleted on the real filesystem as well. So a virus doing rm -rf / could work 😁
Programs from DOSBOX can create/delete/modify things only on mounted discs ... So if you mount a speciall directory for it (e.g. mount c: c:\ dosbox_games ), it has no way to get anywhere else (of course there may be security bugs in DOSBOX, but I doubt that any hacker bothers with looking for them or writing programs abusing them)...
So in this case you should be safe running virus infected file there. Disclaimer: This is just my opinion, I give no guarantees!
However if you do mount c:\ c:\ , then programs in DOSBOX see your whole disc and can write there...
But even so - programs in DOSBOX have access only to files, there is no low level disc access (so. e.g. they cannot format disc etc.)
Mirek
Thanks for fast answer 😊 !
So I can be sure that even if format command is not supported then also any malicious format or int 13/int 25/26 overwite disc sector code is not pulled down to hardware devices , right ?
😁
int 13/some and int 25 and 26 are not supported by dosbox.
there is some fake code there that used for disk present detection but no actual data transfers
Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!
wrote:int 13/some and int 25 and 26 are not supported by dosbox.
there is some fake code there that used for disk present detection but no actual data transfers
Well, if a disk image is mounted the INT13 calls work. Of course, then its just going to single image file on the hard drive and the worst one can expect is a corrupted image file.
