In computer science, protection mechanisms are built into a computer architecture to support the enforcement of security policies.
[1] A simple definition of a security policy is "to set who may use what information in a computer system".
[1] The access matrix model, first introduced in 1971,[2] is a generalized description of operating system protection mechanisms.
[3] The separation of protection and security is a special case of the separation of mechanism and policy.
[4] This computer security article is a stub.