
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All rights reserved. 65
Chapter 4. Authorization: Access to what
Authorization is the process of ensuring that a user (or other computer system) has
permission to perform a given act.
In general, authorization can be enforced in a number of ways, including:
Access Control Lists (ACL)
LDAP groups
Role Based Access Control (RBAC) such as LDAP groups in J2E authorization
Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC)
Authorization can be defined for any given application along a continuum of granularity. For
example, the following list of theoretical authorizations goes from coarse-grained to
fine-grained:
Everyone is authoriz ...