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2.2.1 Initial Research Interest on Policies

The research interest in policies started early with the problem of access control to resources. In [MoSl 88] policies are presented to define rules which regulate how people and programs acting on their behalf can access resources in a computer system. According to this paper, five components are necessary to state such rules:

users
are the people2.1who want to use resources within the computer system. Users are needed so that a policy can state what a user is allowed to do.

resources
are programs, services and data accessed by users. The policy specifies what resources a user can access.

operations
are the specific operations which can be performed on a resource. Each resource type has a set of operations it supports. A policy must specify which operations the user is permitted to invoke on the resource.

authority
is the legitimate power to make policy decisions. The authority can grant access to resources which are in its authority domain.

domain
is a boundary containing resources or users.


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