Glossary
Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)
Attribute-based access control evaluates a policy against the attributes of a specific request — the requester's department, the sensitivity of the target, the time of day, the device's posture — rather than checking membership in a predefined role. This allows much finer-grained and more context-sensitive decisions than a role can express on its own.
The flexibility comes at a cost: an attribute-based policy is harder to reason about at a glance than 'this role can do this,' because the actual permission for a given request depends on evaluating a rule against live attributes rather than reading a static list.