Least privilege means we only give a person the lowest level of access they need, but also only for the time they need it. This can only be based on the location (remote vs. the office) and their current role.
This is also true for runtime program: a running program’s privilege must be only the strict necessary to do its job.
This concept is related to zero trust: trust no one, trust nothing.
In zero trust, all internal and external devices and operations need to be authenticated to make sure they are valid and should have that level of access.
Another related concept is need to know. Credit card number should be obfuscated or masked to prevent leakage.
Sometimes, multiple instances of a record is created, so a person who’s looking at something would see that this has a certain name. That name itself is seen by people who don’t have a high-level access; those who do would see a different naming convention. This is called polyinstantiation.
Yet another concept is separation of duties (segregation of duties). This is where no one controls an entire transaction from its inception through its completion. Different people perform different mutually exclusive tasks (person who input data cannot approve the input). Or there is a multi-party (dual control) system where two people are necessary to do a certain task. Other times, some people know part of a password, and another people know the other: this is split knowledge.