Endpoint privilege management tools aim to reduce risk by limiting standing administrator rights while allowing controlled elevation for approved workloads. Research into Microsoft Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) reveals how design assumptions around file immutability, hash validation and path trust can be undermined to enable local privilege escalation.

By exploiting timing gaps, cloud-backed file systems and execution flows that rely on repeated validation, attackers can coerce trusted mechanisms into launching unapproved code with elevated privileges. These techniques expose how enforcement logic, client-side checks and post-execution validation interact in unexpected ways, particularly when automation and cloud synchronization are involved.

In this session, led by Philip Tsukerman, vulnerability researcher at CyberArk, and Rotem Salinas, senior security researcher at CyberArk, you will learn:

• How hash validation and timing assumptions enable privilege escalation;
• How cloud sync and placeholder files bypass file immutability protections;
• Why path restrictions and execution context awareness matter more than hash trust alone.