Ambient authority

Ambient authority is a term used in the study of access control systems. A subject, such as a computer program, is said to be usingambient authority if it only needs to specify the namesof the involved object(s) and the operation to be performed on themin order for a permitted action to succeed. In this definition, The authority is "ambient" in the sense that it exists in a broadlyvisible environment (often, but not necessarily a global environment)where any subject can request it by name. For example, suppose a C program opens a file for read access by executing the call:

Ambient authority

Ambient authority is a term used in the study of access control systems. A subject, such as a computer program, is said to be usingambient authority if it only needs to specify the namesof the involved object(s) and the operation to be performed on themin order for a permitted action to succeed. In this definition, The authority is "ambient" in the sense that it exists in a broadlyvisible environment (often, but not necessarily a global environment)where any subject can request it by name. For example, suppose a C program opens a file for read access by executing the call: