ACF2 (Access Control Facility 2) is a

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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)

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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 ...

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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 {{operating-system-stub