Privilege escalation is a funny topic nowadays, because the tools at our disposal take so much behind the scenes. It's easy to take getting system for granted when we're playing with Metasploit and the Armitage frontend. In a meterpreter session, for example, we can execute getsystem and often we have SYSTEM privilege in a matter of seconds. How is this accomplished so effortlessly?
Yes, you're right; the word pipe in this context is related to pipelines in the Unix-like world (and, as we just covered in the last chapter, in PowerShell). The pipelines we worked with were unnamed and resided in the shell. The named pipe concept, on the other hand, gives the pipe a name, and by having a name, it utilizes the filesystem so that interaction with it is like interacting with a file. Remember the purpose of our pipelines, to take the output of a command and pipe it as input to another command. This is the easier way of looking at it...