ONTAP must enforce administrator privileges based on their defined roles.

To mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information by entities that have been issued certificates by DoD-approved PKIs, all DoD systems must be properly configured to incorporate access control methods that do not rely solely on the possession of a certificate for access. Successful authentication must not automatically give an entity access to an asset or security boundary. Authorization procedures and controls must be implemented to ensure each authenticated entity also has a validated and current authorization. Authorization is the process of determining whether an entity, once authenticated, is permitted to access a specific asset. Network devices use access control policies and enforcement mechanisms to implement this requirement.

Access control policies include identity-based policies, role-based policies, and attribute-based policies. Access enforcement mechanisms include access control lists, access control matrices, and cryptography. These policies and mechanisms must be employed by the network device to control access between administrators (or processes acting on behalf of administrators) and objects (e.g., device commands, files, records, processes) in the network device.

The access policies must include protecting the data in all three states, i.e. Data at rest , data in use and data in motion. An example of each state can be seen through the use of a configuration setting or file for ONTAP. When stored, the data is at rest. When the data is being updated either through CLI or some web frontend, the data is in use and when the configuration is being transmitted to the devices being managed, the data is in transit.