Dream presents the new Researcher, an LLM-powered agent developed to uncover tiering violations and hidden privilege escalation paths within Active Directory (AD) environments.
The Agent analyzes both the intended structure of AD tiering and the effective permissions assigned to each object. By doing so, it identifies cases where lower-tier Active Directory Objects can inadvertently gain access to higher-tier assets, such as Tier 0 systems or domain controllers.
Protecting Active Directory, especially Tier 0, is a fundamental part of enterprise security. Yet, across numerous assessments, misconfigurations were consistently found, thus allowing lower-tier objects to access higher-tier resources. These issues often create unintended privilege escalation paths that lead to full-domain compromise.
Tiering is an Active Directory hardening strategy that separates administrative control into isolation tiers to stop credential reuse and lateral movement from compromising your crown jewels.
NOTE: These systems qualify as Tier 1 only if they do not store or manage Tier 0 objects (like Domain Admin or privileged service accounts). If they do, they should be elevated to Tier 0.
By isolating the identities and systems that govern your domain from all other components, you prevent common breaches, such as compromised users, infected workstations, or misconfigured servers, from escalating into a comprehensive domain compromise (Tier 0). Robust tier boundaries facilitate incident response, diminish credential reuse and lateral movement, and render privileged access reviews significantly more manageable.
Tiering also offers detailed control over user permissions and administrative roles. It enables precise delineation of who is authorized to perform specific actions and in which locations, thereby enhancing the consistency and manageability of Active Directory management.
The Identity layer represents one of the most complex, critical, and often misunderstood cybersecurity challenges for organizations today. It is highly complex to comprehend and analyze, and it is also the riskiest area within an organization because it involves verifying who truly has access permissions, assessing whether these permissions could pose a threat to the organization, and identifying potential exploitation by attackers.
Microsoft’s Active Directory tiering model was created to impose order on this complexity by dividing identities into distinct “tiers” based on criticality and risk.
The idea is elegant: isolate high-privilege accounts from lower tiers to prevent lateral movement and privilege escalation. Yet implementing and maintaining this separation is extremely difficult. In large governmental environments, such as national networks, ministries, and interagency infrastructures, it is especially challenging due to the tens of thousands of users, service accounts, and organizational units that often collide.
Context matters. Understanding context is critical when evaluating permissions. Some powerful access rights are intentional, while others are accidental or remnants of outdated projects. To perform effective tiering and enforce separation of duties, it’s essential to understand the intended role and purpose of each entity.
Across critical infrastructures, Microsoft consultants and national CERTs alike continue to grapple with the same challenge: understanding the actual permissions each identity has versus the permissions intended by policy.
Because permissions propagate across users, groups, GPOs, and local settings, the result is a complex web that no one fully sees from end to end. In a tier violation situation, this becomes especially dangerous because a less secure user, who is more vulnerable to compromise, can gain permissions that allow them to take control of and modify high-value domain objects quickly. This enables the attacker to escalate privileges fast and threatens the integrity of the entire domain.
The reason is simple: permissions in the real world are contextual, inherited, and ever-changing.
Knowing what you intended for an identity to do (its assigned tier) is one thing; knowing what it can actually do (its effective tier) is another.
Current methods for identifying Tier 0 breach points rely heavily on expert labor. Understanding an enterprise’s current de facto Tier 0 entities and maintaining continuously updated documentation of the enterprise’s permission to harden this least privileged approach requires an expert consultant or an internal subject matter expert. Even then, negligible changes that often breach the tier model need the relevant context of the granted entity, the full implications of the permissions, and the permissions context of the target entity.
The new Identity Researcher Agent was designed to close this gap between theory and reality.
Utilizing an expert AI agent with updatable knowledge of best practices, as each new LLM is released and used by the agent, it has access to a comprehensive knowledge base of various application types and their complex permissions within the AD tree. This enables a significant advancement in hardening the AD permission model. The agent instantly understands the context of each AD entity and determines the minimal privileges required to perform its tasks safely. It maintains full organizational context and continuously evaluates and establishes a strong posture standard autonomously across Dream’s customer base.
It performs a deep, contextual analysis of relationships and permissions across domain objects such as users, groups, service accounts, GPOs, and local permissions to understand how privilege truly flows in your environment.
Dream’s Identity Researcher is a major game-changer for these exact challenges as it analyzes relationships and permissions between domain objects to identify entities that effectively possess misconfigured Tier 0 privileges.
The Identity Researcher Agent empowers security teams to:
Microsoft Exchange Use Case
When installing Microsoft Exchange, new Active Directory (AD) users and groups are automatically created. For example, Exchange Windows Permissions, Organization Management, and Exchange Trusted Subsystem. These groups are designed to simplify administration for Exchange managers, enabling them to create mailboxes, manage AD users with specific mail attributes, and perform other related tasks.
However, because Exchange and Active Directory are tightly integrated, granting Exchange groups the necessary permissions to manage Exchange often results in these groups inheriting high privileges within Active Directory. In many cases, this creates a privilege escalation path to the Tier 0 level.
The Identity Researcher classifies Exchange and its associated objects as classic Tier 1 assets, which, in many environments, represent some of the most common and high-risk paths leading to Tier 0.
An AD Connect server, recently renamed Microsoft Entra Connect, is a tool that syncs an organization’s on-premises Active Directory (AD) with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Password Hash Synchronization (PHS) and Pass-through Authentication (PTA) are common ways to use the AD Connect server. Periodically, the Connect server’s sync account (often an on-premises MSOL_* account) updates password hashes from on-prem AD to Azure AD when Password Hash Synchronization is enabled, allowing the same password in both systems. With Pass-through Authentication, no hashes are synced-sign-ins are validated in real time by an on-prem agent against AD.
Since the AD Connect server operates as a local service responsible for synchronizing password hashes or facilitating on-premises validation of sign-ins against AD, it is regarded as a highly sensitive asset. Depending on the synchronization configuration, an attacker might be able to either extract the password of the MSOL_* service account or intercept any password processed by the synchronization service, thereby potentially gaining access to domain credentials. Over recent years, various techniques have been demonstrated to attack the AD Connect server locally, resulting in the acquisition of valuable credentials.
The Identity Researcher classifies the AD Connect server as a Tier 0 asset, often uncovering critical, overlooked privilege paths from Tier 1 and Tier 2 objects that lead directly to it and, consequently, to domain compromise.
Although not as technical as the previous examples, a prevalent issue the Identity Researcher frequently encounters is the misallocation of permissions from lower-tier objects to higher-tier assets. Many organizations, particularly those managing large and complex Active Directory environments, employ custom naming conventions to categorize users and groups. For instance, all Tier 0 objects might be designated with a naming pattern such as Tier0_<Username>.
However, the common observation is that when analyzing the effective permissions of each object within Active Directory, rather than focusing on their designated role or tier (e.g., Tier 1). It is frequently possible to uncover unexpected privilege pathways that lead to Tier 0 assets.
The Identity Researcher harnesses the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend contextual information, thereby facilitating the clear identification of the intended role of each Active Directory object in contrast to its actual effective permissions.
Active Directory tiering violations rarely arise from a single misconfiguration; instead, they arise from complex interactions among permissions, roles, and integrations. The Identity Researcher utilizes large language model reasoning and contextual analysis to interpret this complexity at scale, consistently revealing concealed escalation pathways.
The longstanding recommendation of “tiered identity isolation” from Microsoft and other security authorities becomes practically applicable. Organizations can now confirm that their theoretical tiering models genuinely correspond with their operational environments.
For governmental and critical-infrastructure customers, this opens a new kind of strategic initiative:
The Identity Researcher Agent makes it possible, for the first time, to understand at scale how privilege segregation is truly implemented, and where it breaks down.
By clicking Subscribe, I agree to the use of my personal data in accordance with Dream security Privacy Policy. Dream security will not sell, trade, lease, or rent your personal data to third parties. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.