reference monitor


reference monitor

[′ref·rəns ‚män·əd·ər] (computer science) A means of checking that a particular user is allowed access to a specified object in a computing system. Also known as access control mechanism; reference validation mechanism.

reference monitor

In operating systems architecture, a reference monitor is a secure, always-used and fully-testable module that controls all software access to data objects or devices. The reference monitor verifies the nature of the request against a table of allowable access types for each process on the system. For example, Windows 3.x and 9x operating systems were not built with a reference monitor, but it was added to Windows starting with Windows NT.