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Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a bug, a design flaw, or a configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected from an application or user.
When privileges are escalated, whether by genuine or malicious means – such as by using the Dirty COW exploit – the user can modify usually unmodifiable binaries and files. If a malicious individual could use the Dirty COW vulnerability to escalate their permissions, they could change a file, such as /bin/bash , so that it performs ...
A number of computer operating systems employ security features to help prevent malicious software from gaining sufficient privileges to compromise the computer system. . Operating systems lacking such features, such as DOS, Windows implementations prior to Windows NT (and its descendants), CP/M-80, and all Mac operating systems prior to Mac OS X, had only one category of user who was allowed ...
When a hierarchy of modes exists (ring-based security), faults and exceptions at one privilege level may destabilize only the higher-numbered privilege levels. Thus, a fault in Ring 0 (the kernel mode with the highest privilege) will crash the entire system, but a fault in Ring 2 will only affect Rings 3 and beyond and Ring 2 itself, at most.
In information security, computer science, and other fields, the principle of least privilege (PoLP), also known as the principle of minimal privilege (PoMP) or the principle of least authority (PoLA), requires that in a particular abstraction layer of a computing environment, every module (such as a process, a user, or a program, depending on the subject) must be able to access only the ...
A common method to implement privilege separation is to have a computer program fork into two processes. The main program drops privileges, and the smaller program keeps privileges in order to perform a certain task. The two halves then communicate via a socket pair. Thus, any successful attack against the larger program will gain minimal ...
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Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL) is a discontinued [1] Linux distribution geared toward computer security students. It functions as a tool for observing and studying vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel and popular user space software. It is available as a live CD, and can be run through a virtual machine within the host operating system. [2]