A production-oriented reference implementation for policy-driven authorization in modern backend systems.
This repository focuses on how authorization systems are designed, not on authentication mechanics or UI concerns.
Authorization logic is often scattered across applications as conditional checks and role flags.
This leads to:
- Inconsistent access rules
- Hard-to-audit permissions
- Tight coupling between business logic and access control
This project explores a centralized, policy-driven approach to authorization that scales across services and domains.
Given:
- Users with multiple attributes
- Resources with ownership and sensitivity
- Actions with different risk profiles
We need a way to:
- Evaluate access decisions consistently
- Separate authorization from application logic
- Support both role-based and attribute-based access control
- Reason about permissions over time
In scope
- Policy evaluation model
- Role-based and attribute-based rules
- Resource-level authorization
- Explicit deny/allow semantics
- Auditable decision outcomes
Out of scope
- Authentication (login, tokens, sessions)
- UI or admin dashboards
- Identity provisioning
- Distributed enforcement agents
The system is composed of three conceptual layers:
- Declarative rules defining who can do what
- Policies expressed independently of application code
- Explicit support for deny rules
- Inputs: subject, action, resource, context
- Deterministic evaluation order
- Traceable decision path
- Application code calls the engine
- Engine returns allow / deny + reason
- Application remains policy-agnostic
Authorization rules live outside application logic.
Why
- Easier audits
- Safer refactoring
- Clear ownership boundaries
Deny rules override allow rules.
Why
- Prevents accidental over-permission
- Matches real-world security expectations
Decisions are based on subject, resource, and context attributes.
Why
- Roles alone are insufficient for non-trivial systems
- Enables fine-grained access control
- Policy conflicts and precedence
- Explainability of decisions
- Avoiding authorization sprawl
- Maintaining performance while evaluating complex rules
This repository is a design-focused reference.
The emphasis is on correctness, clarity, and long-term maintainability rather than implementation details.
MIT