On a system without mandatory access controls [0], absolutely yes. This is what powers some rootkits. [1] Having a dynamic interpreted language runtime availab

On a system without mandatory access controls [0], absolutely yes. This is what powers some rootkits. [1] Having a dynamic interpreted language runtime available as just another item in the syscall table [2] would allow arbitrary, unrestricted execution of code that would not even respect resource limitations set in the root user's shell. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_access_control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_access_control [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit#Kernel-mode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit#Kernel-mode [2] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/kern/syscalls.master http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/kern/syscalls.master