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Roles

A given person or principal need not always have the same set of privileges. Rather than continually change them across different contexts, it is convenient to introduce the notion of a role, a set of actions and responsibilities associated with a particular activity [11] that might be adopted by any principal. A role is normally represented as a set of privilege attributes that a principal or set of principals can exercise within a context of an organization. The notion of a role does not add any power to a security framework, but instead improves manageability by adding an optional level of indirection. Role-based access control provides a higher level of granularity than approaches limited only to individuals. Because roles make transient privilege assignment much easier to administer, they have been widely adopted in security frameworks.





Nataraj Nagaratnam
Mon Mar 16 18:02:57 EST 1998