Clearances

As part of your site's security policy, your security administrator assigns a user clearance to everyone at your site. The user clearance represents the degree of security with which a user is entrusted. It has two components:

• classification - indicates a (hierarchical) level of security. Applied to people, the classification represents a measure of trust; applied to data, it is the degree of protection required. In government, classifications are: TOP SECRET, SECRET, CONFIDENTIAL, and UNCLASSIFIED. Industry is not as standardized; a hypothetical classification hierarchy might be PUBLIC, INTERNAL, NEED TO KNOW, and REGISTERED.

• compartment - represents a grouping, such as a work group, department, project, or topic. Access to compartments is granted on a need-to-know basis.

Some typical clearances are shown in the following figure.

Figure 1-2 Typical Clearances