Linux Privilege Escalation
Privilege Escalation refers to the process of exploiting misconfigurations, known vulnerabilities and unintended bugs in order to gain higher privileges on the target host. The final objective of this process is to gain the highest level of privileges on a target machine, achieving full compromise of that target.
External Resources
Linux Privilege Escalation:
Pages
- Linux Privilege Escalation Enumeration A consolidated reference for enumerating attack vectors on Linux targets, from first shell to root. Commands are grouped by category; exploitation …
- Privileged Groups Group membership is often the shortest path to root — shorter than any kernel exploit and far less risky. The critical first command after landing a …
- Environment Variables Abuse Environment variables are the configuration plane that every process inherits. When a privileged process — a root cron job, a systemd unit, a …
- Capabilities Abuse What are Capabilities? Linux capabilities are a security feature that allows specific privileges to be granted to processes, enabling actions that …
- Programs, Jobs and Services Scheduled and supervised execution is the most consistent privilege-escalation surface on Linux. Root runs something on a timer, on boot, on log …
- Miscellaneous Techniques Techniques in this file do not fit neatly into SUID, sudo, or cron. They are grouped by what you control — a library path, an export, a socket, an …
- Linux Privilege Escalation Checklist Working document — tick as you go. Commands are abbreviated; full detail is in the matching section of the notes. Stop at the first successful path. …