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What Is Discretionary Access Control (DAC)? Definition and Example

Discretionary access control lets an object’s owner or another authorized controller decide who can access it and what rights they receive.
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Discretionary access control (DAC) is an access-control policy in which an object’s owner—or another authorized controller—has discretion over who can access that object and what they can do with it. The key distinction is that access decisions can be delegated by an authorized person, although other controls may limit that discretion.

What discretionary access control means

NIST describes DAC as leaving some access-control decisions to the discretion of an object’s owner or anyone else authorized to control its access. The controller can decide which subjects—such as users or processes—may access the object and which rights they receive. The object might be a file, for example, or another resource protected by an access-control policy.

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In NIST’s fuller definition, a subject granted access may also pass information or privileges to other subjects or objects, grant privileges, change certain security attributes, choose attributes for new or revised objects, or change access-control rules. The policy determines which of these actions are actually allowed; “discretionary” does not mean that every owner has unlimited control. NIST’s glossary definition draws on SP 800-53 Rev. 5.

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A file-sharing example

Suppose a user owns a file and wants a colleague to view it. Under a DAC policy, the owner or another authorized controller can grant that colleague read access. They might instead grant read and write access, or—in systems that use it—execute access. This is the straightforward DAC idea: an authorized controller chooses who gets access and the permitted actions.

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Delegation can create an information-flow risk. NISTIR 7316 describes a case in which someone who can read information copies it into an object they control and shares that copy without the original owner’s knowledge. This illustrates a possible consequence of discretionary sharing, not a behavior guaranteed in every DAC implementation. NISTIR 7316 is an older assessment report, rather than newly issued guidance.

How DAC differs from mandatory access control

Question Discretionary access control (DAC) Mandatory access control (MAC)
Who decides access? The object’s owner or another authorized controller has discretion over some access decisions. A central authority determines access decisions rather than the individual object owner.
Can a user pass access or information onward? NIST’s definition includes passing information or privileges to other subjects or objects, subject to the policy and other controls. The central policy governs access; an individual owner cannot freely delegate in conflict with it.

These are distinctions about where decision-making authority sits. NIST notes that mandatory controls may restrict discretionary capabilities, so DAC and MAC should not be treated as necessarily isolated from one another. See NIST’s MAC glossary entry and SP 800-192. The latter associates discretionary controls typically with identity-based access control and non-discretionary controls with rule-based controls; that is a contextual association, not a complete classification of every access-control model.

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