Chapter 9: Privilege Escalation through the Windows Registry
You should now have a good grasp of how to identify and perform some of the most important privilege escalation techniques on Windows. However, one final piece of this puzzle remains: the Windows Registry. In this chapter, we will look at how to elevate privileges on the target system by leveraging misconfigurations and weaknesses in the Windows Registry.
We will explore the process of identifying misconfigurations in the registry, utilizing the Autorun functionality, exploiting weak registry permissions, and the AlwaysInstallElevated feature to elevate our privileges. We will also provide a brief overview of the Windows Registry to understand its purpose and functionality.
In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:
- Understanding the Windows Registry
- Exploiting Autorun programs
- Exploiting the AlwaysInstallElevated feature
- Exploiting weak registry permissions
