A Systematic Approach for Privilege Escalation Prevention
Fehmi Jaafar, Gabriela Nicolescu, Christian M. Richard · 2016
Information systems are designed to present services and functionalities for multiple users. Thus, it is used to have on one information system different levels of privilege for different users. Privileges describe what a user is permitted to do such as viewing files, modifying or deleting data. Privilege escalation takes place when a user gets access to more resources or services than they are normally allowed to perform unauthorized actions. Many studies have been presented to detect anomalies and vulnerabilities in information systems to discover security issues or attacks related to privilege escalation. In this context, we introduced a systematic methodology that uses pattern recognition and outliers identification to detect numerous abnormal events which can indicate anomalies and security issues related to privilege escalation. In this paper, we describe results from an empirical study in order to show the performance of a new outliers detection algorithm to identify unknown abnormal events and the ability of pattern recognition techniques to specify known abnormal events. Results show that the outlier detection algorithm, enables us to discover unknown abnormal events on synthetic data sets. In addition, results notice the existence and the usefulness of four patterns used the discover known privilege escalation scenarios and, potentially, reduce security issues in systems.