Protection matrix
From Erights
Definition
One way how to capture the permissions of subjects to perform various operations with objects is to use a large matrix where:
- rows correspond to particular subjects
- columns correspond to particular objects
and the context of each cell determines what operations on a particular object are permitted for a particular subject.
An artificial example
If:
- we have only three different subjects (1, 2 and 3)
- eight different objects (six files and a printer and a mixer)
- we recognize three different operations with objects (read, write and execute)
then one possible protection matrix may be:
The matrix determines which operations (R = read, W = write, X = execute) with particular objects are allowed for particular subjects.
It is not very usual to actually store permissions in the form of a 2-dimensional array as shown in the figure above but there are such systems which do so. Usually, the set of subjects and the set of objects are small and immutable.
