Privilege Escalation

Turning a foothold into ownership: riding misconfigurations and kernel bugs from user to root.

Core Principles & Analysis

• Vertical escalation gains higher privilege; horizontal moves sideways into peers’ accounts.
• Misconfigured SUID binaries and services running as root are the classic Unix ladders.
• Modern exploit chains pair a code-execution bug with an escalation bug — one gets in, the other takes over.

Specifications & Metrics

• CWE: CWE-269
• IMPACT: Full system compromise