We have seen how JIRA administrators can restrict general access to JIRA with global permissions, and what project administrators can do to place fine-grained permissions on individual projects through permission schemes. JIRA allows you to take things to yet another level to allow ordinary users to set the security level on the issues they are working with, with issue security.

Issue security allows users to set view permissions (not edit) on issues by selecting one of the preconfigured issue security levels. This is a very powerful feature as it allows the delegation of security control to the end users and empowers them (to a limited degree) to decide who can view their issues.

On a high level, issue security works in a similar way to permission schemes. The JIRA administrator will start by creating and configuring a set of issue security schemes with security levels set. Project administrators can then apply one of these schemes to their projects, which allow the users (with the Set Issue Security project permission) to select the security levels within the scheme and apply them to individual issues.