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title: "MACE: Detecting privilege escalation vulnerabilities in web applications for CCS 2014"
description: "MACE infers a web application's intended access control from its own source by checking that authorization state is enforced consistently, so missing or incorrect checks stand out even without a written policy. Run over large codebases it found previously unknown privilege escalation bugs in five of seven applications, including a horizontal class where one user reaches another's data."
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    title: "MACE: Detecting privilege escalation vulnerabilities in web applications for CCS 2014"
    author: Maliheh Monshizadeh, Prasad Naldurg, V.N. Venkatakrishnan
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authors:
  - Maliheh Monshizadeh
  - Prasad Naldurg
  - V.N. Venkatakrishnan
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# MACE: Detecting privilege escalation vulnerabilities in web applications for CCS 2014

**MACE: Detecting privilege escalation vulnerabilities in web applications for CCS 2014** - Maliheh Monshizadeh, Prasad Naldurg, V.N. Venkatakrishnan, IBM Research.

- Published: date not stated
- Original: <https://research.ibm.com/publications/mace-detecting-privilege-escalation-vulnerabilities-in-web-applications>
- Preserved from: https://research.ibm.com/publications/mace-detecting-privilege-escalation-vulnerabilities-in-web-applications (live) on 2026-08-10
- Licence: unknown

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## Abstract

We explore the problem of identifying unauthorized privilege escalation instances in a web application. These vulnerabilities are typically caused by missing or incorrect authorizations in the server side code of a web application. The problem of identifying these vulnerabilities is compounded by the lack of an access control policy specification in a typical web application, where the only supplied documentation is in fact its source code. This makes it challenging to infer missing checks that protect a web application's sensitive resources. To address this challenge, we develop a notion of authorization context consistency, which is satisfied when a web application consistently enforces its authorization checks across the code. We then present an approach based on program analysis to check for authorization state consistency in a web application. Our approach is implemented in a tool called MACE that uncovers vulnerabilities that could be exploited in the form of privilege escalation attacks. In particular, MACE is the first tool reported in the literature to identify a new class of web application vulnerabilities called Horizontal Privilege Escalation (HPE) vulnerabilities. MACE works on large codebases, and discovers serious, previously unknown, vulnerabilities in 5 out of 7 web applications tested. Without MACE, a comparable human-driven security audit would require weeks of effort in code inspection and testing. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).