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Sec guy (who was mainly a linux guy) was never happy to let people use WSL in corp due to security bugs.

Can anyone chime in - is this still a concern? Was it ever a concern?



QEMU has win64 builds, and the guest OS can access SAMBA/NFS/SSHFS host shares. Getting guest OS hypervisor to work is soft locked on Home licensed windows, so options are often limited to Win guests on linux hosts.

In general, the utilities on posix systems heavily rely on a standardized permission and path structure fundamentally different than windows registry paradigms.

Even something as simple as curl... while incredibly useful on windows, also opens a scripting ecosystem that side-channels Microsoft signing protections etc.

Linux VM disk image files can be very small (some are just a few MB), simply copied to a physical drive/host later given there is no DRM/Key locks, and avoids mixing utf8 with windows codepage.

Mixing ecosystems creates a Polyglot, and that is going to have problems for sure... given neither ecosystems wants the cost of supporting the other.

Best method, use cross platform application ports supported on every platform. In my opinion, Windows should only be used for games and industry specific commercial software support. For robust system privacy there are better options now, that aren't booby-trapped for new users. =3


WSL is an easy compliance trick when you want to run your own Postfix/Dovecot installation.


Depends. How do you feel about an OS running on your network that's not subject to your standard OS hardening, mandatory agent stack?


It's not about bugs, it's that users can do basically whatever they want in their WSL2 guest VMs and most endpoint security software has little control over it or visibility into it. It's a natural little pocket of freedom for users, which is great but undermines efforts to lock those systems down (for good or ill).




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