Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a bug in an application to gain access to resources which normally would have been protected from an application or user. The result is that the application performs actions with a higher security context than intended by the application developer or system administrator.

Privilege escalation examples

• Cross Zone Scripting is a type of privilege escalation attack.
• A Microsoft Windows Service is usually configured run as Local System command. A vulnerability, e.g. buffer overflow or Shell Injection may be used to execute arbitrary code with privilege elevated to Local System.
• In Unix it is not uncommon to have a few commands with both suid root, and world execute permissions enabled. A vulnerability, (e.g. buffer overflow or shell injection) in such a utility may be exploited by any process to execute arbitrary code with privilege elevated to root.

See also

• principle of least privilege
• Privilege revocation
• Defensive programming

Security exploits | System administration

Élévation des privilèges | Повышение привилегий