elevated privilege

A level of access permission — assigned to an account, process, or identity — that exceeds the baseline rights granted to ordinary users, authorizing operations (such as modifying system configuration, accessing restricted resources, or executing security-critical functions) that are withheld from standard accounts. Privileged accounts are those "granted elevated privileges to access resources (including security functions or security-relevant information) that are otherwise restricted for non-privileged accounts," per NIST SP 800-171r3; at the network level, NIST SP 800-50r1 defines this as a condition typically allocated to system administrators, network administrators, DBAs, and others responsible for system/application control, monitoring, or administration. The field uses the expression both as a property of legitimately authorized accounts and as a target state in adversarial contexts: software applications or processes may need to execute with elevated privileges to perform required functions, but this can indirectly provide users with greater privileges than those formally assigned to them; conversely, elevated privileges are important to bypass safety mechanisms of industrial controllers, and can also be used to bypass access controls or security mechanisms more broadly.

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