Glossary
Confused Deputy
A confused deputy is a component that holds legitimate authority to perform some action, and is manipulated by a less-privileged caller into using that authority in a way the caller could never have exercised on its own. The deputy is not compromised in the usual sense — it is doing exactly what it was asked, faithfully, without noticing that the request came from someone who should not have been able to trigger it.
The pattern shows up whenever a component acts on a caller's behalf using its own broader permissions rather than the caller's narrower ones — a service that fetches a resource on request using its own wide-reaching credentials, for example, without checking whether the original caller was actually entitled to that specific resource.