Access Control

Access control is a way of limiting access to a system or to physical or virtual resources. In computing, access control is a process by which users are granted access and certain privileges to systems, resources or information. In older access control systems, users must present credentials before they can be granted access. In current physical systems, these credentials may come in many forms, but these credentials that cannot be transferred in order to provide a heavy security.

Entitlement management is the process granting privileges to resources or users, after fine-grained authentication for controlling access of users. XACML is an OASIS standard that describes both a policy language and an access control decision request/response language (both written in XML).