View source for Argument Injection

'''Argument injection''' is an attack technique in which a malicious actor supplies input to a program that is then passed, unvalidated, to a [[System Call|system call]] or command interpreter as an argument the program never intended to accept. It is not a buffer overflow or a code-injection attack in the traditional sense. The attacker does not overwrite memory or inject new instructions. They simply add arguments — a filename, a flag, a switch — that the receiving program interprets as legitimate, causing it to behave in ways its caller did not anticipate.

The classic example is the Unix .
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./stub-interpretive-communities.txt command, whose  flag can be tricked into executing arbitrary commands when a filename contains the right combination of characters. But the problem is far more general. Any program that constructs command strings from user input — web applications, shell scripts, build systems — is vulnerable if it does not sanitize or quote the input. The vulnerability is not in the called program but in the ''interface between programs'': the boundary where one system's output becomes another system's input without adequate translation.

The deeper systems insight is that argument injection is a failure of [[Trust Boundary|trust boundary]] design. The calling program trusts the user to supply a filename, and the called program trusts the caller to have validated it. Neither trust is warranted, and neither party is responsible for the failure — which is precisely why the failure occurs.

''Argument injection persists not because programmers are lazy but because the interface between programs is almost never designed with adversarial input in mind. We design APIs for cooperation; attackers use them for coercion. The gap is structural, and it will not be closed by better testing. It will be closed only when we stop assuming that the other side of a function call is friendly.''

See also: [[System Call]], [[Trust Boundary]], [[Malware]], [[Operating System]], [[Security Architecture]]

[[Category:Computer Science]] [[Category:Security]] [[Category:Systems]]