Adversaries may use SID-History Injection to escalate privileges and bypass access controls. The Windows security identifier (SID) is a unique value that identifies a user or group account. SIDs are used by Windows security in both security descriptors and access tokens. (Citation: Microsoft SID) An account can hold additional SIDs in the SID-History Active Directory attribute (Citation: Microsoft SID-History Attribute), allowing inter-operable account migration between domains (e.g., all values in SID-History are included in access tokens). With Domain Administrator (or equivalent) rights, harvested or well-known SID values (Citation: Microsoft Well Known SIDs Jun 2017) may be inserted into SID-History to enable impersonation of arbitrary users/groups such as Enterprise Administrators. This manipulation may result in elevated access to local resources and/or access to otherwise inaccessible domains via lateral movement techniques such as Remote Services, SMB/Windows Admin Shares, or Windows Remote Management.

Created

Feb 18, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

Modified

May 12, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC