A Qualitative Analysis of Privilege Escalation

Abstract

Many programming bugs can lead to privilege escalation, which is a major security concern. However, there are times when the concern proves to be a false positive.In a previous paper, "An Approach to Analyzing the Windows and Linux Security Models", a set of metrics was proposed to assess risks quantitatively [1]. However, with the risk quantified, there is still not a clearly defined way of distinguishing between the true and false positives on the continuum of security risks. An effective method needs to be developed to solve this problem.In this paper, a new set of qualitative metrics is proposed in order to draw a correct conclusion on the criticality of a privilege escalation case. This set of qualitative metrics works more effectively to answer this question. Two cases are examined to demonstrate how this set of qualitative metrics works. Through a comparison of these two cases, it is demonstrated that the question of true or false positive to privilege escalation can be answered correctly. Therefore, this is an effective solution in solving this different type of problems.