The problem reported for Mathematica became worse at version 8.0.4, present for the command-line interface "math" also. http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2010-May/074548.html http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/511298 http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/40169 "Mathematica is the world's ultimate application for computations..." http://www.wolfram.com/products/ Mathematica on Linux uses the /tmp/MathLink directory in insecure ways. Mathematica creates or re-uses an existing /tmp/MathLink directory, and overwrites files within and follows symlinks. This type of behaviour is "known unsafe" on multi-user machines e.g. University login servers. As a classic example of a symlink attack, if an "attacker" uses: mkdir /tmp/MathLink; ln -s /home/victim/.bashrc /tmp/MathLink/.shmsrec then when the victim runs Mathematica his ~/.bashrc will be clobbered. New files are created world-writable, allowing a complete compromise of the user account by linking to ~/.bash_logout . (If root ever uses Mathematica then the damage is greater.) There is no workaround: the command-line math interface is also unsafe. Notified support () wolfram com on 7 May 2010, was assigned [TS 16194]. Cheers, Paul Szabo psz () maths usyd edu au http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/ School of Mathematics and Statistics University of Sydney Australia