ACF2

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ACF2 (Access Control Facility) is a commercial discretionary access control software security system developed for MVS (z/OS), VS1 and VM (z/VM) by SKK, Inc. (Barry Schrager, Eb Klemens, and Scott Kruger) 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 at the University of Illinois -- the prototype name was ACF.

ACF2 was developed in response to IBM's RACF (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 was the concepts of "Protection by Default" and resource masking.

As a result of the competative tension between RACF and ACF2, IBM matured the SAF (Security Access Facility) interface in MVS (z/OS) which allowed any security product to process OS, 3rd party software and application security calls, enabling the mainframe to secure all facets of mainframe operations.

SKK and ACF2 was sold to UCCEL in 1986, which in turn was purchased by Computer Associates in 1987. CA, Inc. now markets ACF2 as eTrust CA-ACF2. In 2004, Barry Schrager was asked to create a new security product, Deadbolt, for JME Software. The mainframe version of this product was announced in February 2007. However, Barry is no longer associated with JME Software.