summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/principal.mdwn
blob: c9b952ec987dda61a8ae810176938bc847168166 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]

[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
is included in the section entitled
[[GNU Free Documentation License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]

A principal is an accountable entity.  A principal may be
a user.  On some computer systems, users are represented by their
respective UID.  A process may also be a principal.  However, a
principal may span multiple processes (a web request that causes
a CGI script to be invoked) or a principal may contain a number
of separate principals (a web server serves multiple requests,
each request represents a different principal).