CyberGlossary

Vulnerabilities

Horizontal Privilege Escalation

Also known as: Horizontal EoP, Cross-account access

Definition

A flaw that lets a user access resources or actions of another user with the same privilege level rather than gaining higher rights.

In horizontal escalation an attacker remains at the same trust tier but breaks tenant or per-user isolation: account A reads, modifies or impersonates account B. The most common cause is Broken Access Control — APIs that trust client-supplied identifiers (user IDs, account numbers, document GUIDs) without checking ownership server-side. Insecure Direct Object References, predictable identifiers, missing tenant scoping, and session-fixation bugs are typical roots. Impact ranges from data exposure to financial fraud and is especially damaging in multi-tenant SaaS. Mitigations include enforcing authorization on every object reference, scoping queries by current user/tenant, using unguessable identifiers, and adding automated tests for cross-account access.

Examples

  • Changing the userId in /api/users/123/profile to view another user's profile.
  • A SaaS multi-tenant bug allowing tenant A to query tenant B's orders.

Related terms