Which principle reduces the risk of attackers gaining access to sensitive data by compromising a low-level user account?

Separation of duties divides critical tasks among multiple individuals to prevent any single person from completing a task alone, focusing on preventing fraud or error, not directly limiting access for a single compromised account.

'Limited access' is a general concept but 'least privilege' is the specific principle that dictates the minimum necessary permissions to perform a job, directly addressing the impact of account compromise.

The principle of least privilege ensures that users, processes, and applications are granted only the essential permissions needed to perform their assigned tasks and nothing more. By restricting a low-level user account to minimal privileges, even if compromised, an attacker's ability to access sensitive data or escalate further will be severely curtailed.

Privilege separation is a design principle in operating systems and applications to isolate different parts of a program with different privileges, which is a technical implementation, while least privilege is the overarching security principle.