5 ms·

I suppose in case you ship some prebuilt executable to do stuff? E.g. ffmpeg. Just a guess, though.

• asveikau 7y ago
  IMO execve with its already-parsed-argv is a much safer way to invoke another program. You don't need the shell to interpret the boundaries of command line arguments, it invites trouble.
  • archi42 7y ago
    Doesn't execve() end in the same syscall as system()? Not as comfortable for exploitation, but maybe still feasible? (Embedded systems I take a look at usually don't have an OS with either of the two, so I honestly don't know how the implementations look like).
    • asveikau 7y ago
      system() basically does a fork and an execve of sh -c 'arg passed to system()', then waitpid to block on the result. execve is a syscall, system is a libc function.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      execve("/bin/sh", NULL, NULL) is a quite common replacement for system() in exploits.