High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In computer systems security, role-based access control (RBAC) is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users. It is a newer alternative approach to mandatory access control (MAC) and discretionary access control (DAC). RBAC is sometimes referred to as role-based security. RBAC is a policy neutral and flexible access control technology sufficiently powerful to simulate DAC and MAC. Conversely, MAC can simulate RBAC if the role graph is restricted to a tree rather than a partially ordered set. Prior to the development of RBAC, MAC and DAC were considered to be the only known models for access control: if a model was not MAC, it was considered to be a DAC model, and vice versa. Research in the late 1990s demonstrated that RBAC falls in neither category.