ACF2 (Access Control Facility 2) is a
commercial
Commercial may refer to:
* a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television)
** Radio advertisement
** Television advertisement
* (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...
,
discretionary access control
In computer security, discretionary access control (DAC) is a type of access control defined by the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC) as a means of restricting access to objects based on the identity of subjects and/or groups to w ...
software security system developed for the
MVS
Multiple Virtual Storage, more commonly called MVS, was the most commonly used operating system on the System/370 and System/390 IBM mainframe computers. IBM developed MVS, along with OS/VS1 and SVS, as a successor to OS/360. It is unrelated ...
(z/OS today),
VSE (z/VSE today) and
VM (z/VM today)
IBM mainframe
IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the large computer market. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of th ...
operating systems
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...
by SKK, Inc. Barry Schrager, Eberhard Klemens, and Scott Krueger combined to develop ACF2 at
London Life Insurance
The Canada Life Assurance Company, commonly known as Canada Life, is an insurance and financial services company with its headquarters in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The current company is the result of the 2020 Consolidation (business), amalgamation of T ...
in
London, Ontario
London (pronounced ) is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada, along the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor. The city had a population of 422,324 according to the 2021 Canadian census. London is at the confluence of the Thames River, approximate ...
in 1978. The "2" was added to the ACF2 name by Cambridge Systems (who had the North American marketing rights for the product) to differentiate it from the prototype, which was developed by Schrager and Klemens at the
University of Illinois
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...
—the prototype name was ACF. The "2" also helped to distinguish the product from
IBM's
ACF/VTAM
Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM) is the IBM subsystem that implements Systems Network Architecture (SNA) for mainframe environments. VTAM provides an application programming interface (API) for communication applications, and co ...
.
ACF2 was developed in response to IBM's
RACF
Introduction
RACF, ronounced Rack-Effshort for Resource Access Control Facility, is an IBM software product. It is a security system that provides access control and auditing functionality for the z/OS and z/VM operating systems. RACF was in ...
product (developed in 1976), which was IBM's answer to the 1974
SHARE Security and Data Management project's requirement whitepaper. ACF2's design was guided by these requirements, taking a resource-rule oriented approach. Unique to ACF2 were the concepts of "Protection by Default" and resource pattern masking.
As a result of the competitive tension between RACF and ACF2, IBM matured the SAF (Security Access Facility) interface in MVS (now z/OS), which allowed any security product to process operating system ("OS"), third-party software and application security calls, enabling the mainframe to secure all facets of mainframe operations.
SKK and ACF2 were sold to
UCCEL
UCCEL Corp, previously called University Computing Company ("UCC"), was a data processing service bureau on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. It was founded by the Wyly brothers (Sam and Charles, Jr.) in 1963. Corporation in 1986, which in turn was purchased by
Computer Associates International, Inc. in 1987.
Broadcom Inc. now (2019) markets ACF2 as CA ACF2.
References
Operating system security
Computer access control frameworks
CA Technologies
IBM mainframe software
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