Enrich authorization with Neo4j graph data
Query relationship graphs from Neo4j to power your Cerbos authorization decisions, resolve team hierarchies, reporting chains, and resource ownership at evaluation time.
Neo4j context
Automatically enrich authorization requests with user profiles and group memberships from Neo4j
Cached responses
Configurable TTLs cache query results to balance data freshness against evaluation latency
Zero application code
Identity enrichment happens at the policy layer, your application code stays clean
How Cerbos works with Neo4j
Authorization decisions are only as good as the data behind them. Neo4j provides real-time context (user profiles, group memberships, or external attributes) that makes Cerbos policies richer and more accurate.
Cerbos lets you write fine-grained, context-aware authorization policies in human-readable YAML. With Neo4j as a context source, those policies can evaluate attributes beyond what's in the initial request.
Because enrichment happens at the policy layer, your application code stays clean, no custom plumbing to fetch and merge identity data before making authorization calls.
Relationship-aware authorization with Neo4j
Authorization decisions often depend on relationships: who manages whom, which team owns a resource, who has been delegated access. Flat identity data from tokens or user profiles cannot express these relationships. Cerbos integrates with Neo4j to bring graph-based relationship data directly into your authorization policies.
How it works
- Your application sends an authorization request to Cerbos with the principal and resource identifiers.
- Cerbos queries Neo4j to resolve relevant relationships, team hierarchy, resource ownership, delegation chains, or any custom graph traversal.
- Graph data is available in your policies, write rules like "managers can approve expenses for anyone in their reporting chain" or "only the owning team and their parent organization can modify a resource."
- Results are cached with configurable TTLs to balance query performance and data freshness.
Beyond flat RBAC
Traditional RBAC assigns roles to users and checks them at decision time. But real-world authorization is rarely flat, it follows organizational hierarchies, project structures, and delegation patterns. Neo4j enrichment lets your Cerbos policies reason about these relationships natively.
Get started
Neo4j identity enrichment is available as part of Cerbos enterprise. Talk to us to learn more about powering your authorization decisions with graph data from Neo4j.
FAQ
How does Neo4j enrichment work with Cerbos?
Cerbos queries your Neo4j database at evaluation time to resolve relationships relevant to the authorization decision, such as team membership hierarchies, reporting chains, resource ownership graphs, or any custom relationship model. The results are available as principal or resource attributes in your policies.
What kinds of relationships can I model?
Any relationship that Neo4j can represent, organizational hierarchies, team structures, project ownership, data lineage, approval chains, and more. If your authorization logic depends on 'who reports to whom' or 'which team owns this resource,' Neo4j enrichment makes that data available in your policies.
Why use a graph database for authorization context?
Authorization often depends on relationships that are difficult to represent in flat data structures, transitive team membership, multi-hop resource ownership, delegation chains. A graph database is the natural fit for traversing these relationships efficiently.
Learn more about Cerbos
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Cerbos + Neo4j
- Authorization decisions enriched with real-time Neo4j data
- Context enrichment configured at the policy layer, not in application code
- Identity attributes and business context combined in policies
- Centrally managed authorization logic across the stack
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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.