What does it mean to be a user today?

In Web access control products, the concept of user rights and how they are assigned is similar to the way rights are assigned to users in an internal LAN. However, the terminology is a bit different and varies somewhat from vendor to vendor. We thought it would be helpful to list some common terminology. Each product in our test allows administrators to create, modify and delete most or all of the following:

• Users: Accounts that are created to represent individuals.

• Roles: A working description of a user. Roles are assigned rights.

• Organization: A group of users and/or roles.

• Resources: These can be files, directories and such. Users, Roles and Organizations are assigned rights to resources.

• Super administrator: Administrator with rights to the entire system.

• Sub administrator: Administrator with a limited set of administration rights.

Related links

Lewis is an information assurance specialist working at the U.S. State Department. Wilson is a security engineer at GRC International, and D'Cruze is an optical engineer at Corvis. They can be reached at slewis@ex-pressnet.com, swilson@grci.com, and martin@dcruze.com, respectively.

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