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Permissions

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security

  • 103 Accesses

Synonyms

Access rights;File system permissions Footnote 1

Related Concepts

Access Control from an OS Security Perspective; Access Control Lists; Authorizations

Definition

Permissions specify rights for users or groups of users to access resources in different ways. Operating systems utilize file system permissions for data-oriented access control.

Background

The development of multi-programming and multi-user environments necessitated a mechanism for controlling access in file systems. Daley and Neumann described an early, general purpose file system that included access control lists (ACLs) in the form of sets of attributes associated with each user and file that resemble the fundamentals of permissions in many modern operating systems [1]. The scheme was based on “usage attributes” which were Boolean values that indicated whether or not a particular user was allowed to READ from, WRITE to, APPEND to, and EXECUTE the file.

A somewhat simpler permissions scheme became popular as the...

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Microsoft, Encarta, MSN, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

Recommended Reading

  1. Daley R, Neumann P (1965) A general-purpose file system for secondary storage. In: Proceedings of the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference. ACM, New York, NY, pp 213–229

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  2. Bach M (1986) The design of the UNIX operating system. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs

    Google Scholar 

  3. McKusick M (1984) A fast file system for UNIX. ACM Trans Comput Syst 2(6):181–197

    Google Scholar 

  4. Reichel R (1993) Inside Windows NT Security. Windows/DOS Developers Journal 4(4):6–19

    Google Scholar 

  5. Russinovich M, Solomon D (2009) Windows internals, 5th edn. Microsoft Press, Redmond

    Google Scholar 

  6. Eriksen M, Fields JB (2005) Mapping Between NFSv4 and Posix Draft ACLs. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-nfsv4-acl-mapping-03∖#page-5. Accessed 5 Oct 2010

  7. Shepler S et al (2003) Network File System (NFS) version 4 Protocol, The Internet Engineering Task Force. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3530.txt. Accessed 5 Oct 2010

  8. Viega J, McGraw G (2002) Building secure software. Addison-Wesley, Boston

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  9. Thompson K, Ritchie DM (1971) UNIX Programmer’s Manual. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/1stEdman.html. Accessed 24 Sep 2010

  10. Oracle Solaris 10 (2010) System administration guide: security services. http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4557?l=en. Accessed 20 Sept 2010

  11. How to use CACLS.EXE in a Batch File, Feb 2007. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/135268/. Accessed 5 Oct 2010

  12. How to use Xcacls.exe to modify NTFS permissions, Mar 2007. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318754. Accessed 5 Oct 2010

  13. The Icacls.exe utility is available for Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2, Oct 2007. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919240. Accessed 5 Oct 2010

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 258, Fate, 75132-0258, Dallas, TX, USA

    Dwight Horne

Authors
  1. Dwight Horne
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Henk C. A. van Tilborg

  2. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4422, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Horne, D. (2011). Permissions. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_786

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