Testing fot Privilege escalation

OWASP Testing Guide v3 Table of Contents

This article is part of the OWASP Testing Guide v3. The entire OWASP Testing Guide v3 can be downloaded here.

OWASP at the moment is working at the OWASP Testing Guide v4: you can browse the Guide here

This is a draft of a section of the new Testing Guide v3

Brief Summary

This section describes the issue of escalating privileges from one stage to another...

Description of the Issue

Privilege escalation occurs when a user gets to access more resources than is normally allowed when it should have been protected from the application. This is usually conducted from a flaw in the application. The result is that the application performs actions with more privileges than intended by the application developer or system administrator.

The degree of the escalation depends on which privileges the attacker is authorized to possess and which privileges can be obtained in a successful attack. For example, a programming error that permits a user to gain extra privilege after successful authentication limits the degree of escalation because the user is already authorized to hold some privilege. Likewise, a remote attacker gaining superuser privilege without any authentication presents a greater degree of escalation.

Black Box testing and example

Testing for Topic X vulnerabilities:
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Result Expected:
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Gray Box testing and example

Testing for Topic X vulnerabilities:
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Result Expected:
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References

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