| 6 | 6 | Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) will be used by Orbit to ''control'' each user's ''access'' to Orbit resources based on his or her ''role''. To explain this use of roles, first some terminology. When a user runs an application program that process acts on behalf of the user and is referred to as a ''subject''. An ''object'' is any resource accessible on a computer system, including peripherals, files, databases, and fields in a database. An ''operation'' is an active part of a process invoked by the subject process much like a function call or a method invocation. In general, a ''permission'' or privilege is the authorization to perform some action on the system. In RBAC, a permission is the authorization to perform a given operation on a given object. The use of roles to control access is based on the observation that there may be thousands of users in a given organization, but there are perhaps only a hundred different roles they act in at any given time to access resources. Users are assigned to one or more roles. Each role has a defined set of permissions, each for an operation invoked by a process run by a user acting in that role to access a given object. |
