Determining the vulnerability of computer software applications to privilege-escalation attacks, such as where an instruction classifier is configured to be used for identifying a candidate access-restricted area of the instructions of a computer software application, and a static analyzer is configured to statically analyze the candidate access-restricted area to determine if there is a conditional instruction that controls execution flow into the candidate access-restricted area, perform static analysis to determine if the conditional instruction is dependent on a data source within the computer software application, and designate the candidate access-restricted area as vulnerable to privilege-escalation attacks absent either of the conditional instruction and the date source.