ADPATH-002: Transitive Escalation Chains to Tier-0
- Platform
- Active Directory
- Category
- Attack Paths
- Severity
- Critical
- Zero Trust pillar
- Identity (weight 2)
- Golden fixtures
- 2
- Branch coverage
- Observed: fixtures prove the verdicts they exercise
- Provenance
- baseline
What it checks
Computes MULTI-HOP privilege-escalation chains to Tier-0 by transitively following control (GenericAll / WriteDacl / WriteOwner / AddMember) and group-membership edges — for example HelpDesk --[WriteDacl]--> CORP-Admins --[MemberOf]--> Domain Admins. Complements ADPATH-001 (single-hop) by chaining edges of arbitrary length and reporting the shortest path per principal. Chain DEPTH is bounded by ACL-collection coverage: with the current six-critical-object collection most chains are one hop, so this check is typically clean today; the full-domain ACL collector (roadmap, live-gated) populates control edges over arbitrary objects and unlocks deep low-privilege-to-Domain-Admin chains. The engine itself chains arbitrary depth (BFS shortest-path, cycle-safe).
Recommended value
No transitive control chain leads a non-privileged principal to Tier-0.
Remediation
For each chain, break the weakest link: remove the attacker-controllable ACE at the first hop (the non-privileged principal's control over the next object in the chain), or remove the nested group from the Tier-0 group. Re-run to confirm the chain is severed.
Fixture-proven verdicts
Every verdict below is proven by a golden fixture in the module's gating test suite. This table derives from the last green run; it cannot be edited by hand.
| Scenario | Expected verdict |
|---|---|
| clean | PASS |
| throttled | Not Assessed |
Framework mappings
- NIST SP 800-53
- AC-5, AC-6
- MITRE ATT&CK
- T1098, T1222.001, T1484.001