Inheritance of controls within a hierarchy of data processing system resources

摘要

Provided are methods, apparatus and computer programs for applying access controls to control operations on hierarchically organized data processing system resources. A number of different scopes of applicability can be set in association with an access control, such as an ACL, and this will determine the inheritability, non-inheritability or limited inheritability of the access control for resources in the hierarchy. When a request is received to perform an operation, the access controls for the relevant branch of the hierarchy are processed to determine an applicable access control—taking account of inheritance attributes which have been set for individual access controls. The invention is useful for controlling the application of ACLs to topics in a topic tree within a publish/subscribe message broker.