Discretionary Access Control (DAC)

Overview

Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is an access-control model in which the owner or another authorized principal can decide who receives permissions to a resource. The control exists to ensure that only appropriately identified and authorized principals can access resources or approve actions at the required level of assurance. It differs from an ACL because DAC is the governing model, while an ACL is one mechanism that can record permissions. It should be interpreted alongside Access Control List (ACL) because the concepts can affect the same decision without representing the same control, event, or risk.

The workflow establishes a trusted identity or service principal, binds authenticators, evaluates context, applies policy, and records the resulting access decision. Authorization must be enforced by the server or resource boundary on every relevant request and should not depend on hidden interface elements or untrusted client claims. In this context, organizations should constrain delegation, apply least privilege, control inheritance and sharing, review ownership changes, log grants and revocations, prevent confused-deputy behavior, and use stronger mandatory or role-based controls where owner discretion creates unacceptable risk.

It should connect the term to Access Token where that relationship changes access, transaction treatment, investigation, communication, or recovery.

Records should capture principal, authenticator or credential type, assurance level, resource, action, policy version, contextual signals, decision, failures, recovery, grants, revocations, and administrative changes. Sensitive secrets and authentication content should not be copied unnecessarily into logs.

Useful measures include enrollment and recovery success, challenge rate, failure rate, unauthorized attempts, privilege age, dormant access, review completion, false rejection, compromise events, and time to revoke access.

The relationship with Asset Inventory should be documented where it affects residual risk or control ownership.