diff --git a/rfcs/text/0051-user-is-privileged.md b/rfcs/text/0051-user-is-privileged.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..878898a08 --- /dev/null +++ b/rfcs/text/0051-user-is-privileged.md @@ -0,0 +1,81 @@ +# 0051: Add user.is_privileged boolean field + +- Stage: **0 (strawperson)** +- Date: **2025-06-23** + +This RFC proposes adding a new boolean field, `user.is_privileged`. It will explicitly flag when a user has elevated or administrative rights such as ability to grant permissions, perform `sudo`, or manage IAM roles—so analysts can more easily filter, alert on, and correlate privileged‐user activity without custom parsing. + +## Fields + +```yaml +- name: user.is_privileged + type: boolean + level: extended + description: > + True if the user associated with the event has elevated or administrative privileges, + such as membership in a `sudo` or `Administrators` group, use of `sudo`, or assignment + of owner/admin roles in cloud IAM. + example: true +``` + +## Usage + +Treating privileged status as a first-class field (vs. a tag) lets Kibana’s Entity Store resolve the current boolean value without extra parsing. + +Analysts will often want to perform more focused monitoring on privileged users, having it as a field in ECS will simplify this querying, e.g + +```kql +event.category:authentication and user.is_privileged:true +``` + +## Source data + +The entity centric integrations such as okta entity analytics and Entra ID entity analytics could populate this field, linux and windows integrations could also annotate command executions with this. + +## Scope of impact + + + +## Concerns + +- Cross-platform consistency: what counts as “privileged”? + + + + + + +## People + +The following are the people that consulted on the contents of this RFC. + +* @hop-dev | author +* @jaredburgettelastic | co-author +* @MikePaquette | SME + + + +## References + + + +### RFC Pull Requests + +* Stage 0: https://github.com/elastic/ecs/pull/2493 + +