Elastic high stable eql

Potential Privilege Escalation via unshare Followed by Root Process

Detects a short sequence where a non-root user performs unshare-related namespace activity (often associated with user namespace privilege escalation primitives) and then a root process is executed shortly after. This can indicate a successful local privilege escalation attempt or suspicious namespace manipulation captured in Auditd Manager telemetry.

View Source

Detection Logic

sequence by host.id, process.parent.pid with maxspan=30s
 [process where host.os.type == "linux" and 
  (
   (auditd.data.syscall == "unshare" and auditd.data.class == "namespace" and auditd.data.a0 in ("10000000", "50000000", "70000000", "10020000", "50020000", "70020000")) or 

   (process.name == "unshare" and  
    (process.args in ("--user", "--map-root-user", "--map-current-user") or process.args like ("-*U*", "-*r*")))
   ) and user.id != "0" and user.id != null]
 [process where host.os.type == "linux" and 
  user.id == "0" and user.id != null and 
  (
   process.name in ("su", "sudo", "pkexec", "passwd", "chsh", "newgrp", "doas", "run0", "sg", "dash", "sh", "bash", "zsh", "fish", 
                    "ksh", "csh", "tcsh", "ash", "mksh", "busybox", "rbash", "rzsh", "rksh", "tmux", "screen", "node") or 
   process.name like ("python*", "perl*", "ruby*", "php*", "lua*")
  )]

False Positives

⚠ Legitimate sandboxing, container tooling, or maintenance scripts may use unshare and spawn privileged helpers under controlled workflows. Baseline approved tools and tune by host role, parent process, or user accounts.

Field Validations

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