Accessing data and services
GeoServer supports access and control, both at the service level, allowing for the lockdown of service operations to only authenticated users who have been granted a particular role, and on a per-layer basis.
The two approaches cannot be mixed. If you lock down a service to a role, you cannot grant the access on a specific layer to the same role.
When working with layers, you can define rules that specify what a role can do on any specific layer. The operations controlled are the view, write, and admin access. When granting read access on a layer, you enable a user to add it on a map; while granting write access you enable the user to update, create, and delete features contained in the layer. The admin access level enables the user to update the layer's configuration.