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.
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.
Learn more about Cerbos
Related integrations
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Cerbos + EmpowerID
- Cerbos extends EmpowerID roles with fine-grained, attribute-based permissions
- Policies defined in human-readable YAML, managed as code
- Authorization logic decoupled from application code
- Sub-millisecond policy evaluation via stateless PDP
Authorization for AI systems
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What is Cerbos?
Cerbos is an end-to-end enterprise authorization software for Zero Trust environments and AI-powered systems. It enforces fine-grained, contextual, and continuous authorization across apps, APIs, AI agents, MCP servers, services, and workloads.
Cerbos consists of an open-source Policy Decision Point, Enforcement Point integrations, and a centrally managed Policy Administration Plane (Cerbos Hub) that coordinates unified policy-based authorization across your architecture. Enforce least privilege & maintain full visibility into access decisions with Cerbos authorization.