Mandatory Access Control



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Mandatory Access Control

The need for a mandatory access control (MAC) mechanism arises when the security policy of a system dictates that:

  1. protection decisions must not be decided by the object owner.
  2. the system must enforce the protection decisions (i.e., the system enforces the security policy over the wishes or intentions of the object owner).
The POSIX.6 standard provides support for a mandatory access control policy by providing a labeling mechanism and a set of interfaces that can be used to determine access based on the MAC policy.



John Barkley
Fri Oct 7 16:17:21 EDT 1994