Decades-Old Bash Tricks Expose AI Coding Agents to Supply Chain Attacks
Bash (Bourne Again SHell), the 1989 GNU rewrite of the original Linux Bourne Shell, can still cause problems more than three decades later through its Bash Tricks. Adversa AI has discovered a structural security flaw in multiple open source AI agents. It’s not a specific bug but a process that can get malicious Bash instructions ingested into the agent, and from there into whatever the agent does – typically with the operator’s approval.
Adversa calls this structural issue GuardFall.
“We tested eleven popular open source agents, including Hermes, OpenCode, Roo-code, and others,” explains Serge Malenkovich, head of communications at Adversa AI. “Ten leave the gap open in one of four ways; and only one closes it.”
The ‘gap’ is a failure to guard the agent against the decades old Bash shell tricks, such as quote removal and $IFS spacing. Since these agents run with a developer’s full account authority,...
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