Inside Java™ 2 Platform Security: Architecture, API Design, and Implementation, Second Edition

5.1. Permissions

The permission classes represent system resources and the operations supported on those resources. Each permission has a String name, and some permissions also have a String action list. An example of a permission is a FilePermission with name "/tmp/abc" and action "read", which specifies read access to the file /tmp/abc. Permissions are used to specify both what resource accesses are allowed by a policy and what permissions are required at runtime prior to performing security-sensitive operations.

Permission objects are used in a security policy to indicate which security-sensitive resource accesses are allowed for various groups of code, that is, for code in various locations, with various signers, executed by various users ...