Glossary
Security Trimming
Security trimming filters a set of search results, at query time, down to only what the specific searcher is authorized to access — rather than returning everything the underlying index contains and relying on some other layer to withhold what shouldn't be shown. Because a search index is often a separate, derived copy of the original data, its own access enforcement has to be applied deliberately; it doesn't automatically inherit the source data's permissions just because it was built from it.
The risk this addresses directly is a stale or incomplete index: a document's access was changed at the source, but the index wasn't updated to match, and a search still surfaces it — or a snippet of it — to someone whose access to the original was already revoked. Trimming that checks current authorization at query time, rather than relying on the index to already reflect it, closes that specific gap.