Elements of the User-Level Security Model

To establish user-level security, Microsoft Jet uses a set of elements that, taken as a whole, describe the model. The four elements that make up the model are:

• The user of your application. This may be a real person or a process running on a computer.
  
  
• The group. A group is a logical collection of users who require the same level of access to a set of objects. Users can belong to more than one group.
  
  
• The SystemDB or workgroup information file. This is a Microsoft Jet database that physically stores the definitions of users, groups, and passwords.
  
  
• Your database. The database contains your application’s objects, along with the permission settings for each object for each user and group.

Figure 10.1 illustrates how these elements relate.

Figure 10.1 The Microsoft Jet security model