Security considerations are important if you are using find or
xargs to search for or process files that don’t belong to you
or which other people have control. Security considerations
relating to locate may also apply if you have files which you
do not want others to see.
The most severe forms of security problems affecting
find and related programs are when third parties bring
about a situation allowing them to do something
they would normally not be able to accomplish. This is called privilege
elevation. This might include deleting files they would not normally
be able to delete. It is common for the operating system to periodically
invoke find for self-maintenance purposes. These invocations of
find are particularly problematic from a security point of view
as these are often invoked by the superuser and search the entire
filesystem hierarchy. Generally, the severity of any associated problem depends
on what the system is going to do with the files found by find.