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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.
There are many binaries used in Linux which are read-only, and can only be modified or written to by a user of higher permissions, such as the root. 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.
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.
sudo centralizes all privilege authorization information in a single configuration file, /etc/sudoers, which contains a list of users and the privileged applications and actions that those users are permitted to use. The grammar of the sudoers file is intended to be flexible enough to cover many different scenarios, such as placing restrictions ...
Most file systems include attributes of files and directories that control the ability of users to read, change, navigate, and execute the contents of the file system. In some cases, menu options or functions may be made visible or hidden depending on a user's permission level; this kind of user interface is referred to as permission-driven.
In the original example of a confused deputy, [3] there was a compiler program provided on a commercial timesharing service. Users could run the compiler and optionally specify a filename where it would write debugging output, and the compiler would be able to write to that file if the user had permission to write there.
In computer programming and computer security, privilege separation (privsep) is one software-based technique for implementing the principle of least privilege. [1] [2] With privilege separation, a program is divided into parts which are limited to the specific privileges they require in order to perform a specific task. This is used to ...
In computing, privilege is defined as the delegation of authority to perform security-relevant functions on a computer system. [1] A privilege allows a user to perform an action with security consequences. Examples of various privileges include the ability to create a new user, install software, or change kernel functions.