In Computer science, protection mechanisms are built into a computer architecture to support the enforcement of security policies.[1] A simple definition of a security policy is "to set who may use what information in a computer system".[1]
Anita K. Jones, Richard J. Lipton The enforcement of security policies for computation ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Proceedings of the fifth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles. Austin, Texas, United States. pp. 197 - 206. 1975