The CLI tools shipped in Debian python-rdflib-tools package can load modules from the current directory [1]:

    $ echo 'print("Something")' > cgi.py
    $ rdf2dot
    INFO:rdflib:RDFLib Version: 4.2.2
    Something
    Reading from stdin as None...

This could be a security issue because an attacker could possibly exploit this behavior to execute arbitrary code.

This happens because these CLI tools are implemented as:

    #!/bin/sh
    
    exec /usr/bin/python -m rdflib.tools.rdfpipe $*

"python -m $module", "python -c $code" and "$command | python" prepend the current working directory in the Python path. The Python documentation [2] should probably warn about this. In Python 3, "-I" could be suggested to prevent the script/current directory to be added to the Python path. However, this flag has other effects.

The Python documentation suggests "python -m" commands at some places [3-5]: some form of warning at those places might be nice as well.

See the related behavior of Perl. Perl used to include "." in @INC but this was removed for security reasons [6].


[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=921751.
[2] https://docs.python.org/3/using/cmdline.html
[3] https://docs.python.org/3.1/library/json.html
[4] https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.server.html
[5] https://docs.python.org/3/library/zipapp.html
[6] https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/perldelta.pod#Removal-of-the-current-directory-%28%22.%22%29-from-@INC