A vulnerability exploitable with only local access requires the attacker to have either physical access to the vulnerable system or a local (shell) account. Examples of locally exploitable vulnerabilities are peripheral attacks such as Firewire/USB DMA attacks, and local privilege escalations (e.g., sudo).

The access conditions are somewhat specialized; the following are examples:

• The attacking party is limited to a group of systems or users at some level of authorization, possibly untrusted.
• Some information must be gathered before a successful attack can be launched.
• The affected configuration is non-default, and is not commonly configured (e.g., a vulnerability present when a server performs user account authentication via a specific scheme, but not present for another authentication scheme).
• The attack requires a small amount of social engineering that might occasionally fool cautious users (e.g., phishing attacks that modify a web browsers status bar to show a false link, having to be on someones buddy list before sending an IM exploit).

Authentication is not required to exploit the vulnerability.

There is considerable informational disclosure. Access to some system files is possible, but the attacker does not have control over what is obtained, or the scope of the loss is constrained. An example is a vulnerability that divulges only certain tables in a database.

There is no impact to the integrity of the system.

There is no impact to the availability of the system.