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T1484.002: Trust Modification

View on MITRE ATT&CK The MITRE Corporation · Published 28/12/2020 22:59 · Modified 04/05/2026 16:31

Essential information

MITRE technique ID
T1484.002
Confidence
100/100
Revoked
No
Published
28/12/2020 22:59
Modified
04/05/2026 16:31
Author / Source
The MITRE Corporation

Platforms

windows Identity Provider

Description

Adversaries may add new domain trusts, modify the properties of existing domain trusts, or otherwise change the configuration of trust relationships between domains and tenants to evade defenses and/or elevate privileges.Trust details, such as whether or not user identities are federated, allow authentication and authorization properties to apply between domains or tenants for the purpose of accessing shared resources.(Citation: Microsoft - Azure AD Federation) These trust objects may include accounts, credentials, and other authentication material applied to servers, tokens, and domains. Manipulating these trusts may allow an adversary to escalate privileges and/or evade defenses by modifying settings to add objects which they control. For example, in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) environments, this may be used to forge [SAML Tokens](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1606/002) without the need to compromise the signing certificate to forge new credentials. Instead, an adversary can manipulate domain trusts to add their own signing certificate. An adversary may also convert an AD domain to a federated domain using Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), which may enable malicious trust modifications such as altering the claim issuance rules to log in any valid set of credentials as a specified user.(Citation: AADInternals zure AD Federated Domain) An adversary may also add a new federated identity provider to an identity tenant such as Okta or AWS IAM Identity Center, which may enable the adversary to authenticate as any user of the tenant.(Citation: Okta Cross-Tenant Impersonation 2023) This may enable the threat actor to gain broad access into a variety of cloud-based services that leverage the identity tenant. For example, in AWS environments, an adversary that creates a new identity provider for an AWS Organization will be able to federate into all of the AWS Organization member accounts without creating identities for each of the member accounts.(Citation: AWS RE:Inforce Threat Detection 2024)

Kill chain phases

Kill chainPhase
mitre-attack defense-evasion
mitre-attack privilege-escalation

Marking (TLP)

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External references