Computer Concepts: Security

To ensure that the computer is avoiding tasks that are not permitted to be done (for example, an internet user is trying to fetch a company’s secret records,) the following measures might be taken:

• Each task type might have a list of users who are allowed to perform the tasks and those who are not. Alternatively, each user might be associated with a list of tasks he or she is permitted to do. This method is called authorization, and each user is either authorized or not authorized to complete a task.
• To prevent external, and perhaps harmful requests from being executed on the computer, hardware or software firewalls are used. They deny traffic of information to the computer via a certain device, and thereby ‘filter’ the incoming requests from that device, keeping the computer safe from intruders.