active entity

The subject role in an access control model — an entity (generally an individual, process, or device) that causes information to flow among objects or changes system state, as opposed to a passive entity that merely contains or receives information. It is distinguished from a passive object by being the initiating party that requests access to an object or the data within an object; it may be a user, program, or process acting to accomplish a task. The field uses the active/passive distinction to anchor access controls — the security features that govern how users and systems communicate and interact with other systems and resources. The contrast class is equally stable: an object (passive entity) contains information and may be a computer, database, file, program, directory, or field in a table.