Role-based access control

Role Based Access Control is an alternative to discretionary access control and mandatory access control.

Within an organisation, roles are created for various job functions, and these roles are assigned permissions. Staff are made members of appropriate roles and thus aquire the permissions assigned to those roles.

This leads to greatly simplified administration of permissions. For example, a staff member can be immediately and simply assigned a new role when changing departments, rather than closing all existing access, and creating a new set of access controls. As the staff member's career progresses, then his or her roles are enhanced, and the associated permissions are automatically granted.

In an organisation, there will exist, an every evolving policy for access control. RBAC is policy neutral in itself and nicely facilitates the application of the organisation's policy.