The Security Annotation Framework (SAF) is an instance-level access control framework driven by Java 5 annotations. It can be easily integrated into Spring applications which primarily use the SAF to control access to their domain object instances. SAF security annotations define locations in the source code where the SAF shall perform permission checks at runtime. An annotation-driven approach to instance-level access control promotes the separation of an application’s security logic from its business logic. This significantly increases the testability and reusability of application components. It further allows the implementation of instance-level access control features into existing applications without modifying existing business logic.