access enforcement mechanism

A category of security safeguard — implemented in hardware, software, firmware, or cryptography — whose specific function is to operationalize an access control policy by actively permitting or denying subjects' interactions with protected objects at the point of attempted access. Examples enumerated in authoritative guidance include access control lists, access control matrices, and cryptography, all employed to control access between users (or processes acting on behalf of users) and objects such as devices, files, records, processes, programs, and domains. The expression distinguishes the *enforcement* layer — what actually carries out decisions at runtime — from the *policy* layer that defines the rules, and the two are treated as complementary: policies state what shall be permitted, while access enforcement mechanisms are the implementations that give those policies effect, applied at both the system level and, when additional protection is needed, at the application level. They can also be employed at the application and service level to provide increased information security and privacy, meaning the term is used in standards and regulatory guidance to describe any technical

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