Patent 7685632 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on March, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A facility for performing an access control check is provided. The facility receives a request to perform an access control check to determine whether authorization exists to access a resource. The access control check is performed against the identity of a principal, a policy that applies to the principal, and the identity of the resource the principal wants to access. The principal may either be an application program or a combination of an application program and an identity of a user in whose context the application program is executing.