This family defines the requirements on the management of security attributes.
Users, subjects and objects have associated security attributes that will affect the behaviour of the TSF. Examples of such security attributes are the groups to which a user belongs, the roles he/she might assume, the priority of a process (subject), and the rights belonging to a role or a user. These security attributes might need to be managed by the user, a subject or a specific authorised user (a user with explicitly given rights for this management).
It is noted that the right to assign rights to users is itself a security attribute and/or potentially subject to management by FMT_MSA.1.
FMT_MSA.2 can be used to ensure that any accepted combination of security attributes is within a secure state. The definition of what "secure" means is left to the TOE guidance and the TSP model. If the developer provided a clear definition of the secure values and the reason why they should be considered secure, the dependency from FMT_MSA.2 to ADV_SPM.1 can be argued away.
In some instances subjects, objects or user accounts are created. If no explicit values for the related security attributes are given, default values need to be used. FMT_MSA.1 can be used to specify that these default values can be managed.