Is GNUCASH, in fact, unsafe....

[Robert Heller]

At Wed, 9 Nov 2011 18:52:10 -0800 (PST) "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> Hmm. A search for "gnucash virus" turns up some interesting pages, not the least being:
> 
> http://forums.cnet.com/7726-6132_102-5199287.html 
> This does not indicate a virus, but it does mention two potential vulnerabilities that the development team may need to examine and address.
> 
> 
> In 2009, there was a problem with a (possible?) virus in the MySQL dependency, although there doesn't appear to have been a conclusion to that thread. Nabble has this at: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Virus-in-downloaded-exe-td1449515.html
> 
> In 2008, PortableApps had a thread about a false positive virus report on the portable version of Gnucash at http://portableapps.com/node/14390.
> 
> 
> I also wonder if the use of the loopback device by gconf (do I have that right?) might be causing trouble. I know it raised flags for some observant Windows users a while back.

It is a common *UNIX* thing to write helper code using daemons and the
(available) loopback (lo, aka IP address 127.0.0.1) network device as
an interprocess communication method, esp. if the daemon is serving a
number of applications.  I believe GNUCash, being a Gnome/GTK
application expects to communicate with the gconf daemon (which I
believe a version is included with the MS-Windows port of GNUCash),
which uses this method of interprocess communication.  The gconf daemon
provides access to a configuration database for Gnome/GTK applications.
 It sounds like various MS-Windows virus checkers don't really know how
to deal with this intellegently, probably because it is not how pure
native MS-Windows applications do things (they all just get
configuration info from the MS-Windows registry or something).  GNUCash
has been developed in a Linux (UNIX) environment and uses Linux (UNIX)
program methodologies. 

> 
> David
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Yongxin Wang <fefe.wyx at gmail.com>
> To: danchurch at aol.com
> Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2011 4:41 PM
> Subject: Re: Is GNUCASH, in fact, unsafe....
> 
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 00:15,  <danchurch at aol.com> wrote:
> > Avast (which several times has saved my butt) flags gnucash as unsafe.
> >
> > It offers to open the program in its safe sandbox, but here it fails with error message.
> 
> Avast used to complain about the gspawn-win32-helper.exe in my old
> version of GnuCash some time ago (and I added it as an exception), but
> now with the most recent version of Avast and virus definition and
> GnuCash 2.4.7, it is not complaining(I removed the exception from
> Avast).
> 
> > I would love to escape Quicken. Seems I can not.
> >
> > Dan Church
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>                           

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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