thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Security Fundamentals & Crypto · Intermediate

Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

Access control model that evaluates attributes of the subject, object, action, and environment against policies.

Definition

ABAC policies combine attributes such as department, clearance, resource sensitivity, device compliance, location, and time to make fine-grained, context-aware decisions. It is defined in NIST SP 800-162 and is well suited to zero trust and cloud environments. XACML and AWS IAM conditions with tags are implementations.

Example

Allow access if user.department == resource.department and device.compliant == true and time is within business hours.

Exam tip

ABAC is the most granular and flexible model; it's the best fit for context-aware or zero trust scenarios.

Don't confuse it with

Related terms