A coworker once set up a bash-based shell wrapper to provide customers with restricted access to the monitoring system. The monitoring system was written as CGI programs in C, and the shell script was there to sanitize input arguments, and that the hosts/tests being viewed matched the customers regex pattern (say, ".*\.customer\.tld").

The next day, I showed him how I could break out of that protection by sending a request with a parameter like "host=x.customerb.tld\0.customera.tld" (with a NULL byte in between).

We did a few more rounds of whack-a-mole until I finally managed to convince him this was a fundamentally bad idea.

Completely agree!

One approach is to run it in a Docker container and access it from your other micro services and never expose it to the public. This is still handy because you can isolate that old program and act as if it is an API to your other micro services.

Acronyms are trendier. and fewer bytes of you're performance-obsessed.