system account

A credentialed identity established on a system through which a user, process, or service is authorized to access system resources. The account carries the attributes that govern that access - its authorized users, its group and role membership, and its access privileges - and is managed across a lifecycle of creation, enablement, modification, disablement and removal. Account types are enumerated by the controlling framework rather than assumed: NIST SP 800-171r3 and SP 800-53 name individual, group, temporary, system, guest, anonymous, emergency, developer and service accounts, several of which an organization may prohibit outright because of the risk they carry. The phrase is a term of art and it is the umbrella term rather than one of the types: "system" appears in that list as a single account type, while a privileged account is defined as a system account holding the authorizations of a privileged user.