tldr: There are a variety of ways that attackers can cause you to execute execute arbitrary code when you echo their maliciously-crafted data to your terminal. Therefore, when you run curl without redirecting its output, or when you cat a file you’ve downloaded, you’re trusting the server (and also the network, when you don’t have https:// in the url) not to exploit you.
Could you give me an ELI5 please
This post The Terminal Escapes: Engineering unexpected execution from command line interfaces has a summary of the longer paper in the first link.
tldr: There are a variety of ways that attackers can cause you to execute execute arbitrary code when you echo their maliciously-crafted data to your terminal. Therefore, when you run
curlwithout redirecting its output, or when youcata file you’ve downloaded, you’re trusting the server (and also the network, when you don’t havehttps://in the url) not to exploit you.Ah ok that makes sense, thank you!