Privilege revocation

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Privilege revocation is the act of an entity giving up some, or all of, the privileges they possess, or some authority taking those (privileged) rights away.

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[edit] Information theory

Honoring the Principle of least privilege at a granularity provided by the base system such as sandboxing of (to that point successful) attacks to an unprivileged user account; helps in reliability of computing services provided by the system. As the chances of restarting such a process are better, and other services on the same machine aren't effected (or at least probably not as much as in the alternative case: i.e. a privileged process gone haywire instead).

[edit] Computer security

In computing security privilege revocation is a measure taken by a program to protect the system against misuse of itself.

Privilege revocation is a variant of privilege separation whereby the program terminates the privileged part immediately after it has served its purpose. If a program doesn't revoke privileges, it risks the escalation of privileges.

Revocation of privileges is a technique of defensive programming.

[edit] Law terminology

In law the general term is often used when discussing some paper, such as a drivers licence, being voided after a (negative) condition is met by the holder.

[edit] References