A Comparative Study of Privkit and Winpeas for Identifying Privilege Escalation Vulnerability in Window Environment

Privilege escalation represents a security concern which hackers extensively abuse in Windows environments. The exploitation of system misconfigurations through inconsistent services together with improper registry configurations and inadequate file permissions allows attackers to achieve unpermitted administrative control. This research evaluates the privilege escalation vector detection abilities of PrivKit and WinPEAS as tools used to find vulnerabilities in Windows systems. This research aims to evaluate the capabilities and detection range combined with effectiveness of both tools through a simulated virtual testing platform. The virtual lab utilized Windows 7 and Windows 8 as target systems together with Kali Linux operating as the attacking platform. Both tools carried out checks across Windows systems looking for unquoted service paths and AlwaysInstallElevated settings as well as weak access control lists (ACLs) and exploitable tokens. The evaluation measured two key performance indicators: detection accuracy along with execution time and false positive rates and usability. The experimental findings show that PrivKit generates more precise details in its reports while it detects false positives at a slightly higher frequency and demands higher resource utilization. The scanning speed of WinPEAS remains superior while its output stays neat however the tool does not deliver complete details or remediation instructions. Security assessments can benefit from a joint application of PrivKit alongside WinPEAS to detect more vulnerabilities while minimizing their undetected numbers. Security professionals achieve better privilege escalation auditing results in complex legacy environments due to using this combined approach. This research shows that multiple investigational tools should form part of an active defense system when handling privilege escalation security risks.