// GLOSSARY

Privilege Escalation

Moving the authority held by the current identity to a higher level along a path it was not designed for. It has two forms: horizontal escalation, moving to the rights of another identity at the same level; vertical escalation, climbing to a higher authority level. The concept's central role in attack logic comes from this reality: an attacker rarely starts at the highest authority directly at their target; they usually enter from a low-privilege position, and the real work is accumulating, step by step, the authority to reach the critical target. So a single permission can look harmless on its own yet, as a link in a chain, make reaching the critical target possible; the real question is not 'is this permission dangerous' but 'which escalation does this permission open the door to'. In cloud environments, privilege escalation often happens not through a software vulnerability but through a misconfigured IAM policy, an overly broad role or a transitive-privilege relationship. It is the destination of privilege-chain and effective-permission analysis; the assessment targets not individual permissions but the escalation paths permissions open to one another.