Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure: Concepts, Standards, and Deployment Considerations

Privilege Management

Privilege management is a generic term for what is variously called authorization, access control, rights management, permissions management, capabilities management, and so on. Specifically, this topic addresses what an entity is allowed to see and do within a particular environment. This topic also encompasses questions such as the following:

• Is Alice allowed to read this record in the database?

• Can Bob execute this application program?

• Should Christine be granted remote access to this network?

• Must David be prevented from seeing pages in this portion of the Web server?

• Are purchase orders for over $10,000 from Erica to be accepted?

Policies (sometimes referred to as rules) must be defined for individual entities, for particular ...