Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Welcome! Today we'll dive into Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). It's a fundamental security concept for managing who can do what in an application.

Imagine a school: students can view grades, teachers can post grades, and administrators can manage all users. Each group has a 'role' with specific 'permissions'.

• Role: A collection of permissions.
• Permission: The ability to perform a specific action (e.g., read, write, delete).

Spring Security uses roles to enforce authorization. When you define a user, you also assign them one or more roles.

Internally, Spring Security treats roles as Granted Authorities. By convention, roles are often prefixed with ROLE_ (e.g., ROLE_ADMIN, ROLE_USER). This helps distinguish them from other types of authorities.