Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
User Interface Privilege Isolation (UIPI) is a technology introduced in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to combat shatter attack exploits. By making use of Mandatory Integrity Control, it prevents processes with a lower "integrity level" (IL) from sending messages to higher IL processes (except for a very specific set of UI messages).
A shatter attack takes advantage of a design flaw in Windows's message-passing system whereby arbitrary code could be injected into any other running application or service in the same session, that makes use of a message loop. This could result in a privilege escalation exploit. [1]
Leo Davidson discovered that Microsoft weakened UAC in Windows 7 through exemption of about 70 Windows programs from displaying a UAC prompt and presented a proof of concept for a privilege escalation. [29] Stefan Kanthak presented a proof of concept for a privilege escalation via UAC's installer detection and IExpress installers. [30]
A privilege level in the x86 instruction set controls the access of the program currently running on the processor to resources such as memory regions, I/O ports, and special instructions. There are 4 privilege levels ranging from 0 which is the most privileged, to 3 which is least privileged.
In information security, a confused deputy is a computer program that is tricked by another program (with fewer privileges or less rights) into misusing its authority on the system. It is a specific type of privilege escalation. [1] The confused deputy problem is often cited as an example of why capability-based security is important.
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 ...
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 ...