Fine-grained and expressive access control policies on application resources need to be enforced in applicationlevel code. Uniformly enforcing a single policy (referred to as the organizationwide policy) in diverse applications is challenging with current technologies. This is due to a poor delimitation of the responsibilities of application deployer and security officer, which hampers a centralized management of a policy and therefore compromises the uniformity of its enforcement.

To address this problem, the concept of an access interface is introduced as a contract between an organizationwide authorization engine and the various applications that need its services. The access interface provides support for the central management of the policy by the security officer. By means of a view connector, the application deployer ensures that each application complies with this contract, so that the policy can be enforced.