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Click, Share and Expose - The Hidden Danger in a Simple Click.
We’ve all done it. You right-click a folder, select "Share," and grant a colleague access to a file they need. This simple, everyday action is a form of Discretionary Access Control (DAC), one of the most common ways we manage permissions in the digital world. It feels intuitive, quick, and harmless.
However, this familiar process hides a fundamental strategic tension between operational agility and security posture. Our intuitive understanding of granting access often overlooks the complex web of permissions that grow silently in the background, creating vulnerabilities that are difficult to track.
This article explores this strategic trade-off regarding access control.
We’ll zoom out a little and look at the foundation of a more resilient and modern defense for our most valuable digital assets.
The Convenience Trap: How "Easy" Access Quietly Becomes A Security Risk
Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is one of the early, basic and foundational access control models. In a DAC model, resource owners—the people who create files, databases, or other system objects—have the authority to grant access to others at their own discretion.
The primary benefit of DAC is its flexibility and speed. For fast-moving teams, the autonomy to adjust permissions without waiting for centralized approval is a major advantage. Developers and IT teams can configure and modify access quickly, lowering the learning curve and reducing onboarding time.
But this flexibility is also its greatest weakness. Because any resource owner can grant access, permissions can become chaotic, leading to a phenomenon known as "permission sprawl." Without centralized governance, it’s easy to lose track of who has access to what, creating an unquantified and expanding attack surface.
This problem is best illustrated with real-world scenarios:
The Lingering Manager: A product manager needs access to a sensitive usage analytics dashboard for a quarterly roadmap. The developer who owns the dashboard grants the product manager access. After the project ends and they move to a new product line, their access remains, creating a potential compliance issue or data leak.
The Persistent Contractor: A third-party contractor is given read and write permissions in a production environment to help debug a microservice. The developer leading the integration grants them access with a few clicks. The contract ends, but their access is never revoked. The organization remains exposed, and because there is no centralized audit trail, no one realizes the vulnerability exists.
Why Maximum Security Isn't Always the Smartest
Mandatory Access Control (MAC) represents the opposite approach to DAC. It is a rigid, centralized security framework where access decisions are based on system-wide rules, security labels, and clearance levels—not user discretion. In a MAC model, an administrator establishes the rules, and the system enforces them without exception, much like a government security clearance model.
The clear benefit of MAC is its tight security. By removing personal discretion, it minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and is ideal for highly regulated industries like government, finance, and healthcare.
The surprising drawback, however, is that MAC's inflexibility creates significant "operational friction" and "bottlenecks." This rigidity can be slow to adapt to changing business needs, as every update requires administrative intervention. This friction heavily impacts technical teams; developers often "bear the brunt of troubleshooting," and routine changes—like granting a new user admin privileges—require submitting a ticket.
While MAC excels at enforcing a static security policy, it is fundamentally misaligned with the dynamic nature of DevOps and agile development, where roles and permissions must adapt at the speed of deployment. It forces a critical decision. As one security provider notes, "It’s not about which is better, it’s about what you’re willing to risk."
Security Shifting Beyond Roles: Verifying Who You Are
As organizations navigate the limitations of both flexible and rigid models, an advanced solution is emerging as the logical response to the dissolution of the traditional network perimeter and the rise of Zero Trust architectures: Identity-Based Access Control (IBAC). This security model shifts the focus from generalized policies to a personalized approach where the verified identity of the user is paramount.
Gone Are The Good Old Days.
Moving from the easy-breezy world of Discretionary Access Control (DAC) to the locked-down fortress of Mandatory Access Control (MAC) isn’t just a tech upgrade—it’s a whole new way of thinking about trust. The old security perimeter? Gone. These days, identity is the last thing standing between your data and the wild west of the internet.
DAC is fast and loose—great for speed, not so great for oversight. MAC is super strict—great for control, but not exactly nimble. But today’s digital world is messy, fast-moving, and full of remote teams and sneaky threats. That means we need smarter, more personal ways to decide who gets access.
Somewhere in between is where Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) fits in.
ABAC asks: What is the context of your request? It makes decisions based on attributes like time of day or a user's location.
So here’s the big question: Is it still enough to ask what someone’s job title is, or should we be digging deeper to figure out who they really are and whether they should be let in?
That’s where Identity-Based Access Control (IBAC) comes in. Unlike other models, IBAC doesn’t just care about your role or the context—it cares about you. It asks a different kind of question:
RBAC says: What’s your job function? You’re an admin? Cool, here’s your access.
ABAC says: What’s the situation? You’re logging in from HQ at 9 a.m.? Sounds legit.
IBAC says: Are you really who you say you are? Prove it first—then we’ll talk access.
IBAC puts identity front and center, using strong authentication to make sure the person behind the keyboard is actually the person they claim to be. In a world full of phishing, spoofing, and credential stuffing, that’s not just smart—it’s essential.
back to more articlessecurity ABAC ACM Access Control Model Adaptive Model Attribute-Based Access Control Contextual Model DAC DevSecOps Discretionary Access Control IBAC Identity-Based Access Control MAC Mandatory Access Control Permission Sprawl RBAC Role-Based Access Control SecDevOps Unquantified Attack Surface Zero Trust context flexible ACM operational agility posture operational security posture rigid ACM secure engineering security architecture 2023
