History
The original formulation is from Jerome Saltzer:
Every program and every privileged user of the system should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job. —Peter J. Denning, in his paper "Fault Tolerant Operating Systems", set it in a broader perspective among four fundamental principles of fault tolerance.
Dynamic assignments of privileges was earlier discussed by Roger Needham in 1972.
Historically, the oldest instance of least privilege is probably the source code of login.c, which begins execution with super-user permissions and—the instant they are no longer necessary—dismisses them via setuid with a non-zero argument.
Read more about this topic: Principle Of Least Privilege
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“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)