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(August 2012)| |Look up authorization in Wiktionary, the free
dictionary.| Authorization (also spelled authorisation in
British English) is the function of specifying access rights to
resources, which is related to information security and computer
security in general and to access control in particular. More
formally, "to authorize" is to define access policy. For
example, human resources staff are normally authorized to access
employee records, and this policy is usually formalized as
access control rules in a computer system. During operation, the
system uses the access control rules to decide whether access
requests from (authenticated) consumers shall be approved
(granted) or disapproved (rejected). Resources include
individual files' or items' data, computer programs, computer
devices and functionality provided by computer applications.
Examples of consumers are computer users, computer programs and
other devices on the computer. Access control