Is this key-oriented access-protection pattern a known idiom?

Matthieu M. brought up a pattern for access-protection in this answer that i'd seen before, but never conciously considered a pattern:

class SomeKey { 
    friend class Foo;
    SomeKey() {} 
    // possibly make it non-copyable too
};

class Bar {
public:
    void protectedMethod(SomeKey);
};

Here only a friend of the key class has access to protectedMethod():

class Foo {
    void do_stuff(Bar& b) { 
        b.protectedMethod(SomeKey()); // fine, Foo is friend of SomeKey
    }
};

class Baz {
    void do_stuff(Bar& b) {
        b.protectedMethod(SomeKey()); // error, SomeKey::SomeKey() is private
    }
};

It allows more fine-granular access-control than making Foo a friend of Bar and avoids more complicated proxying patterns.

Does anyone know whether this approach already has a name, i.e., is a known pattern?

Solution 1:

Thanks to your other question it looks like this pattern is now known as the "passkey" pattern.

In C++11, it gets even cleaner, because instead of calling

b.protectedMethod(SomeKey());

you can just call:

b.protectedMethod({});

Solution 2:

It seems that this idiom like one mentioned in another SO question here. It is called Attorney-Client idiom and described in more details there.