A security policy process which provides role-based permissions for hierarchically organized system resources such as domains, clusters, application servers, and resources, as well as topic structures for messaging services. Groups of permissions are assigned to roles, and each user is assigned a role and a level of access within the hierarchy of system resources or topics. Forward or reverse inheritance is applied to each user level-role assignment such that each user is allowed all permissions for ancestors to the assigned level or descendants to the assigned level. This allows simplified security policy definition and maintenance of user permissions as each user's permission list must only be configured and managed at one hierarchical level with one role.