Security in Computing 5th Edition by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Charles P Pfleeger, Jonathan Margulies

Exercise 1

Describe each of the following four kinds of access control mechanisms in terms of (a) ease of determining authorized access during execution, (b) ease of adding access for a new subject, (c) ease of deleting access by a subject, and (d) ease of creating a new object to which all subjects by default have access.

• per-subject access control list (that is, one list for each subject tells all the objects to which that subject has access)

• per-object access control list (that is, one list for each object tells all the subjects who have access to that object)

• access control matrix

• capability

Step 1 of 11

Access control mechanisms

The given access list with the related information is given below:

• Per-subject access control list

The access control mechanism works on subject and object. The definition of these parameter changes from system to system, like in an operating system a file tries to access a resource, here; the file is the object while resource is the subject. The per-subject access control list creates the access list directory for each subject with their specified access by different objects. In the Multics OS, user in the control list belongs to three protection classes: a user, a group, and a compartment. The user class is for the normal user, the group corresponds to the people working with the same interest while the compartment is to confine the user to a certain domain.