But privilege escalation does not imply "being root", it only means "ability to perform operation as root" (or whatever the role is can can be compromised). If

But privilege escalation does not imply "being root", it only means "ability to perform operation as root" (or whatever the role is can can be compromised). If your distribution accidentally packaged a suid root /bin/cat, that would allow a normal user to perform (read) operations on all files on the system, so it would be a privilege escalation, but it would not necessarily lead to arbitrary code execution as root (unless that allowed you to read a file with the root password, say).