[netvl]

As far as my understanding goes, performing a .so injection at least on Linux systems is much easier: you just need to set up an LD_PRELOAD variable before running the program and that's it. See, for example, here [0].

And it is sometimes useful. One thing I can recall when this was necessary when I had an old webcam which did not work with Skype (a native application, at that moment) under Linux because of incompatibility with V4L2. To make the camera work, I had to do the LD_PRELOAD trick to preload a compatibility library (see here [1], search for "v4lcompat"). Another example, provided in [0], is overriding the default memory allocator.

Another, more coarse-grained way to manipulate the way libraries are loaded is to use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. I believe it is currently used by Steam to specify its own set of libraries.

Granted, this is not really a DLL injection as it is usually understood (adding code to a running process), but it is the same thing as described in the article, as far as I can tell.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426230/what-is-the-ld-pr... [1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SkypeWebCams

edit: grammar

[cesarb]

Both the LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables are ignored for setuid programs, and if the program was started by something else you won't be able to change these variables. The issue here is not injecting code into a process you control, it's injecting code into a process running under a different account.