Enterprise Mac Security: Mac OS X Snow Leopard

13.5. Permission Models

In larger environments, system administrators have been grappling with various methods to handle file permissions for a good while now. Over the years, the Mac administrative community has developed a few different methodologies as standard practices for managing permissions. In this section, we'll touch on these permissions methodologies, or models, to give you a better understanding about the ways that file-sharing permissions policies can be implemented on Mac networks.

Discretionary access control (DAC) allows data owners to administer file permissions themselves. In a DAC model, administrators often spend less time assigning permissions (which often means spending more time restoring accidentally deleted files). ...