crossprivilege

Crossprivilege, sometimes written cross-privilege, is a term used in cybersecurity and systems engineering to describe a situation in which an actor or process gains or is permitted to operate across privilege boundaries that would normally constrain it. The concept covers both privilege escalation and privilege crossing between domains, applications, or trust boundaries, enabling actions at a higher privilege than intended or access to resources outside the actor’s nominal scope.

In practice, crossprivilege can arise through misconfigurations, design flaws, or weaknesses in trust models, such as overly broad token scopes, insecure tokens, multi-tenant isolation failures, or cross-domain messaging that does not validate permissions properly. It may manifest as an attacker using a compromised lower-privilege account to perform privileged actions in another service, or as a service component that inadvertently or intentionally forwards privileges across boundaries.

Contexts include cloud platforms with shared services, enterprise systems integrating with partner domains, and web applications that rely on federated authentication or cross-origin calls. Related mechanics include horizontal privilege escalation (gaining the same level in another context) and cross-domain privilege abuse via tokens, service accounts, or identity brokers.

Mitigation involves strict boundary enforcement, least privilege, explicit scope checks for tokens and API calls, robust isolation between tenants or domains, rigorous auditing, and defense-in-depth across authentication, authorization, and service-to-service communication. Secure design patterns include token binding, scoping, and formal access control models.

Crossprivilege is a broad concept rather than a single vulnerability, used to describe a class of risks that arise whenever privilege boundaries are poorly enforced or trust is too permissive across systems.