Friday, May 25, 2012

Understanding the Concept of Privilege Escalation

Здравствуйте!

In order to understand what Privilege of Escalation in Active Directory is, it is first helpful to understand the concept of security privilege escalation in general.

Here is the definition of Privilege Escalation from Wikipedia -

Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a bug, design flaw or configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected from an application or user. The result is that an application with more privileges than intended by the application developer or system administrator can perform unauthorized actions.

To put it simply, security privilege escalation is the process by which someone can elevate the level of access they have in a security system, by exploiting some weakness of the system, or by using social engineering, to gain more access.

For example, lets say a user Alice only had the access to be able to read files on a file-server, but not to be able to modify the files. If Alice could somehow, i.e. by means of some actions, elevate the level of access granted to her so that she could now also modify files on the file-server, then in effect she would have escalated her privilege in the system to obtain more power.

For instance, Alice could exploit a weakness in the system itself, or discover weaknesses in access rights granted in the system which would allow her to enact some steps and ultimately gain elevated access, then she would have in effect elevated her security privilege in the system.

In other words, privilege escalation is a very powerful concept because it lets someone obtain more privilege in a system than he/she is supposed to have, and its consequences can be very serious, because a skilled individual could do a lot of damage to a system with escalated privileges.

Privilege escalation, when applied to Active Directory, is one of the most powerful ways in which someone could obtain administrative power in a Microsoft network, and potentially use it to cause widespread damage across the network.

In the next post, I will cover why the concept of privilege escalation is so pertinent to Active Directory, and how Active Directory's powerful but complicated security model makes it easy for anyone with read access to Active Directory to find many avenues of privilege escalation.

Спасибо

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