Identity providers

Cerbos authorization for EmpowerID

EmpowerID provides identity governance, access management, and privileged access for the enterprise. Cerbos consumes EmpowerID's identity signals, delegated roles, and group memberships to make fine-grained authorization decisions at the application layer.

Governance-aware policies

Use EmpowerID role assignments, group memberships, and delegated access as inputs to Cerbos authorization policies

Application-level control

Translate enterprise identity governance into fine-grained, resource-level access decisions within your applications

Separation of concerns

EmpowerID governs identity lifecycle and access certification. Cerbos enforces authorization at the application layer.

How Cerbos works with EmpowerID

EmpowerID handles authentication, confirming who a user is. Cerbos handles authorization, deciding what that user can do. Together they give you a complete access control stack without coupling identity logic to business rules.

Cerbos lets you write fine-grained, context-aware authorization policies in human-readable YAML. Policies are decoupled from application code so product and security teams can update permissions without a release cycle.

Because Cerbos runs as a stateless Policy Decision Point (PDP) next to your application, authorization checks are sub-millisecond and scale horizontally with your infrastructure.

Policy-as-codeHuman-readable YAML policies managed like source code Scalable PDPStateless policy decision point with sub-millisecond latency Centralized managementManage, test, and deploy policies from a single control plane

How Cerbos works with EmpowerID

Users authenticate through EmpowerID, EmpowerID handles authentication, MFA, and identity governance. It assigns roles and group memberships based on your organizational policies and access certification workflows.
Extract identity from EmpowerID tokens, Your application receives tokens from EmpowerID containing the user's roles, group memberships, organizational unit, and any custom attributes from the identity store.
Send identity and resource context to Cerbos, Pass the EmpowerID user attributes as principal attributes alongside the target resource and desired action to the Cerbos PDP.
Cerbos evaluates policies and returns a decision, Cerbos evaluates your YAML policies against the EmpowerID identity data and resource attributes, returning allow or deny. Your application enforces the result.

FAQ

How does Cerbos work with EmpowerID?

EmpowerID authenticates users and manages identity governance, including role assignments, group memberships, and delegated access. Cerbos receives these identity attributes and evaluates them against your authorization policies. EmpowerID governs who users are and what roles they hold. Cerbos decides what they can do within your applications.

Can Cerbos use EmpowerID's delegated administration model?

Yes. EmpowerID supports delegated administration and role mining across directories. Pass the user's delegated roles and organizational scope to Cerbos as principal attributes, and your policies can enforce access rules that respect EmpowerID's delegation hierarchy.

Does Cerbos replace EmpowerID?

No. EmpowerID handles identity lifecycle, access certification, and privileged access management. Cerbos handles application-level authorization. They address different layers of the access control stack and work together.