Privilege delegation is the practice of allowing a user to perform specific administrative actions without giving them full control of an account or system. Instead of making someone an all-powerful administrator, a security policy can permit only approved commands, files, or workflows.
This matters because it limits the damage from mistakes and from compromise. In real environments, tools like sudo use privilege delegation to let trusted users run selected commands as another user, often with logging and policy checks. Attackers target these delegation layers because a flaw there can turn a narrow permission into a privilege escalation path. Defenders rely on careful rule design, strong auditing, and enforcement of every execution path so that delegated power stays within policy.