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Glossary

What is access control?

Access control is the policies and technical rules that decide which people or services can reach a resource, and what each one may do with it.

Updated 21 Aug 2026

01

Where this one gets misread

Access control gets demonstrated as a login screen and a list of roles. The question that decides whether it works is where enforcement happens: a system that retrieves passages a user is not allowed to see, then filters the results afterwards, has already pulled that content into the answer.

02

Questions to ask

Ask for a worked example on your own material, and the evidence needed to reproduce it.

  • Is permission checked at retrieval or after the answer is drafted?
  • What happens when someone's access is withdrawn mid-session?
  • Are permissions read from your identity system or kept separately?
  • How is an access decision recorded?
03

How Marella uses the term

We use “Access control” only where a product mechanism or an evaluation method backs it up, and we say when the behaviour depends on how a deployment is configured.

  • Backed by a product mechanism or an evaluation method
  • Deployment differences flagged

What this page does not prove

  1. B1A definition is not a claim about how the product performs.
  2. B2Vendor implementations vary.
  3. B3Test the term against a representative workflow.

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