What Is Discretionary Access Control (DAC)?

Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is protection access management that gives or takes away object access based on a policy determined by an object's owner. This means that the owner determines who gets to use their stuff, which sounds pretty cool until you realize that it can also mean giving someone else all of your things if they get hold of your password. DACs are discretionary because users can decide whether to give their stuff away, but they can adjust their minds at any time. They're also defined by user identification with provided credentials during authentication, such as username and password. DAC is easy to execute and intuitive, but it has its disadvantages. DAC is easy to implement because the system's core is just a few lines of code. You must take some data, convert it into a number, and then write that number somewhere else in your system. It's that simple! However, there are some downsides to using DAC. For example, if you need to encrypt your data before writing it back out again, you'll have to do much more work than another method. Also, sometimes DAC can be slower than other methods because it relies on brute force rather than ingenuity. In other words, an object's owner gets to decide who gets access to their stuff and when they get access to it—whether it's something as simple as a few files or something as complex as a house or a car. In DAC, each system object has an owner—and each initial entity owner is the subject that pushes its creation. Thus, an object's access policy is defined by its owner. So, if you're a subject and you want to be able to read a file, you need to own it. If someone else owns it, then you can't read it. This is how DAC works: it gives users control over who can access their files.