Masterkolloquium

Companies engage security experts to penetrate their infrastructures and sys- tems in order to find vulnerabilities before malicious persons do. During these penetration tests, security experts often encounter Windows endpoints or sys- tems and gain low privileged access to these. To fully compromise the system, privileges have to be escalated.
Windows contains a great number of security concepts and mechanisms. These render privilege escalation attacks difficult. Penetration testers should have a sound knowledge base about Windows components and security mechanisms in order to understand privilege escalation concepts profoundly and apply these.
This thesis imparts knowledge on Windows required to understand privilege escalation attacks. It describes the most relevant privilege escalation methods and techniques and names suitable tools and commands. These methods and techniques have been categorized, included into an attack tree and were tested and verified in a realistic lab environment. Based upon these results, a system- atic and practical approach for security experts on how to escalate privileges was developed.