10.5 Summary

Where untrusted parties can create files on the system, or affect the names of files that are created, all uses for find, locate and xargs have known security problems except the following:

Informational use only

Uses where the programs are used to prepare lists of file names upon which no further action will ever be taken.

‘-delete’

Use of the ‘-delete’ action with find to delete files which meet specified criteria

‘-execdir’

Use of the ‘-execdir’ action with find where the PATH environment variable contains directories which contain only trusted programs.