Policy-driven authorization at the Kong Gateway
Enforce fine-grained Cerbos authorization policies at the Kong Gateway edge — before requests reach your services.
Native Kong support
Cerbos speaks Kong's native protocol, no custom glue code required
Unified policies
The same CEL-based policies that govern your application layer extend to your infrastructure
Defense in depth
Authorization at every layer of your stack, managed from a single control plane
How Cerbos works with Kong Gateway
Enforcing authorization at the Kong Gateway gateway means unauthorized requests are rejected before they reach your services, reducing load, improving security posture, and simplifying backend code.
Cerbos provides fine-grained, context-aware authorization policies written in human-readable YAML. When integrated with Kong Gateway, these policies are evaluated at the edge for every incoming request.
The same Cerbos policies govern authorization at the gateway and within your services, one source of truth, one audit trail, and consistent enforcement across every layer.
How Cerbos works with Kong Gateway
- Deploy Cerbos alongside Kong Gateway, Run the Cerbos PDP as a sidecar or service accessible from your Kong Gateway.
- Configure the gateway plugin, Set up Kong Gateway to call Cerbos on incoming requests, passing identity and request metadata.
- Define authorization policies in YAML, Write policies that control access based on routes, methods, roles, and request attributes.
- Requests are authorized at the edge, Unauthorized requests are rejected before reaching your services, reducing load and improving security posture.
FAQ
How does Cerbos work with Kong Gateway?
Kong Gateway calls the Cerbos PDP for every incoming request. Cerbos evaluates your authorization policies using the request context (headers, claims, path) and returns an allow or deny decision, all at the gateway edge.
Does this replace backend authorization?
Gateway-level authorization provides defense in depth. You can enforce coarse-grained policies at the edge and fine-grained policies within your services, both managed by Cerbos.
Learn more about Cerbos
Related integrations
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Cerbos + Kong Gateway
- Cerbos evaluates fine-grained policies at the Kong Gateway edge
- Unauthorized requests rejected before reaching upstream services
- Same policies enforced at the gateway and within services
- Centrally managed and audited authorization decisions
Authorization for AI systems
By industry
By business requirement
Useful links
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.