From the course: Complete Guide to Cybersecurity: A Practical Approach

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Understanding mandatory access control (MAC)

Understanding mandatory access control (MAC)

From the course: Complete Guide to Cybersecurity: A Practical Approach

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Understanding mandatory access control (MAC)

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- [Instructor] Let's go over Mandatory Access Control. Mandatory Access Control dictate that only specific designated security administrators can apply additional settings beyond those that are set with Discretionary Access Control or DAC. Now, the primary difference between MAC and DAC, so in other words, between Mandatory Access Control and Discretionary Access Control is who can control access in that system. Now, let's take a look at this diagram here to create an example on how this works behind the scenes. Basically, you have user space, and let's say that a user wants to open a file. So basically, there's a process in the system that invokes a system call to open a file. And behind the scenes, in the kernel space, there are a lot of things that actually are happening. For example, we first check to see if there are any errors. If there's some errors, of course, we come back and we cease operations, and we display an error back to the user. If there are no errors, then we…

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