Privilege Escalation
Noun · Security & Infosec
Definitions
The act of exploiting a vulnerability or misconfiguration to gain elevated access rights beyond those originally granted, moving from a limited user to administrator or root.
In plain English: Upgrading yourself from a regular user to an admin on a system by exploiting a flaw — going from guest to owner of the building.
Etymology
- 1970s
- Multi-user systems introduce privilege levels; researchers document techniques for moving from user to superuser access
- 1996
- Aleph One publishes 'Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit' in Phrack, detailing buffer overflow exploits for privilege escalation
- 2010s
- Privilege escalation becomes a standard phase in the MITRE ATT&CK framework, cataloguing dozens of techniques
Related Terms
- Buffer Overflow
- Rootkit
- Exploit
- Hash
- Authorization
- Capability
- Dependency Confusion
- Clickjacking
- IDOR
- Supply Chain Security
- EAP
- Fail-Closed
- Fail-Safe Default
- Grace Period
- Least Privilege
- Mandatory Access Control
- NAC
- Network Access Control
- Padding Oracle Attack
- Port Knocking
- Data Lake Security
- Database Firewall
- Endpoint Privilege Management
- Least Authority
- Management Plane Security
- Memory Scraping