Adversaries may execute their own malicious payloads by hijacking environment variables the dynamic linker uses to load shared libraries. During the execution preparation phase of a program, the dynamic linker loads specified absolute paths of shared libraries from various environment variables and files, such as LD_PRELOAD on Linux or DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES on macOS. Libraries specified in environment variables are loaded first, taking precedence over system libraries with the same function name. Each platform's linker uses an extensive list of environment variables at different points in execution. These variables are often used by developers to debug binaries without needing to recompile, deconflict mapped symbols, and implement custom functions in the original library. Hijacking…