DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Please enter at least three characters to search
Refcards Trend Reports
Events Video Library
Refcards
Trend Reports

Events

View Events Video Library

Zones

Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks

Last call! Secure your stack and shape the future! Help dev teams across the globe navigate their software supply chain security challenges.

Modernize your data layer. Learn how to design cloud-native database architectures to meet the evolving demands of AI and GenAI workloads.

Releasing software shouldn't be stressful or risky. Learn how to leverage progressive delivery techniques to ensure safer deployments.

Avoid machine learning mistakes and boost model performance! Discover key ML patterns, anti-patterns, data strategies, and more.

Related

  • Designing for Security
  • What Is API-First?
  • How SecDevOps Adoption Can Help Save Costs in Software Development
  • Seamless Security Integration Strategies in Software Development

Trending

  • Start Coding With Google Cloud Workstations
  • Automating Data Pipelines: Generating PySpark and SQL Jobs With LLMs in Cloudera
  • Measuring the Impact of AI on Software Engineering Productivity
  • How to Convert XLS to XLSX in Java
  1. DZone
  2. Culture and Methodologies
  3. Agile
  4. Authorization: Get It Done Right, Get It Done Early

Authorization: Get It Done Right, Get It Done Early

Use early and decoupled authorization for secure software development and consider important implementation factors.

By 
Emre Baran user avatar
Emre Baran
·
May. 30, 23 · Opinion
Likes (2)
Comment
Save
Tweet
Share
4.7K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

As the founder of Cerbos, I have first-hand experience with the challenges that CTOs face when building software solutions that meet immediate requirements while also future-proofing their infrastructure. This balancing act becomes particularly challenging when addressing complex authorization requirements in enterprise settings, which is why there are significant benefits to building the correct solution early on.

Large organizations require sophisticated and flexible authorization systems to accommodate diverse roles and access levels. As these companies grow, their authorization needs evolve, making it difficult to anticipate future requirements. Additionally, enterprises face the challenge of managing multiple departments, geographies, and seniority levels, which further complicates the authorization landscape. As organizations scale, the stakes for security, compliance, and performance increase, creating more pressure on CTOs to balance current needs with preparing for future growth.

Why Decoupled Authorization?

Decoupled authorization is an increasingly popular solution in modern software development stacks, enabling developers to manage access control policies independently of the underlying application, providing flexibility, scalability, and maintainability. However, as applications become more complex and interconnected, businesses must prioritize better security practices, reduce development time, and comply with regulations and audits more easily. While avoiding overengineering is a common approach for new builds, it may not be sufficient for future needs. 

Decoupled authorization, with its role-based and attribute-based access control (RBAC and ABAC), can help meet more complex requirements as an organization grows. For instance, in a small company, a manager, a user, and an IT admin may suffice for managing access control. However, in a larger organization with thousands of managers in different roles, geographies, and departments, authorization becomes much more complex. As a result, CTOs face the challenge of building a comprehensive system upfront while also rolling out a minimum viable product (MVP) to get to market quickly. Unfortunately, authorization requests often rank low in terms of priority, making it difficult to allocate resources for their implementation. Decoupled authorization can help overcome these challenges by providing a scalable, secure, and reliable solution that is easy for developers to integrate and understand.

What To Consider When Implementing Decoupled Authorization

It's important to select a solution that meets your application's requirements and can scale with your needs. Consider factors such as ease of integration, performance, flexibility, and support for different access control models. Ideally, the solution should seamlessly integrate with your existing infrastructure, including identity providers, data stores, and messaging systems, to avoid introducing new vulnerabilities or dependencies.

There are various challenges that a development team may face when implementing decoupled authorization: 

Ensuring Policies Are Enforced Accurately and Efficiently

An authorization system must be robust, accurate, and perform well under load. It's essential to validate policies before deployment and ensure that they are applied consistently across the application. For example, a development team for a large e-commerce platform must ensure that the decoupled authorization system can handle a high volume of user requests during peak shopping times in order to protect sensitive user data and prevent unauthorized access to restricted resources such as payment information or order management.

Maintaining Policy Consistency Across Multiple Services and Microservices

Maintaining policy consistency across multiple services and microservices can become challenging as applications scale and evolve. Developers must ensure that authorization rules are synchronized and that changes propagate correctly throughout the system. For example, a content streaming platform may use microservices for user management, content catalog, and billing. As new features and services are added, the development team must ensure that authorization policies remain consistent across all microservices.

Dealing With Policy Conflicts and Resolutions

Increasing the number of policies also increases the potential for conflicts. Developers must be able to detect and resolve these conflicts to ensure that the correct access permissions are applied in all scenarios. For example, in a healthcare application, a doctor may have access to their own patients' records, but access to records of patients outside their care may be restricted to emergency situations. In this case, the development team must implement a mechanism to detect and resolve policy conflicts, ensuring that the doctor can access critical information in emergencies but is restricted from accessing other patients' records in non-emergency situations.

Standardise Communication Across the Business

Communicating effectively will allow your business to implement authorization quickly; use clear, concise policies that are easy to understand and maintain. Using comments and descriptive names for variables, functions, and classes helps provide context and improve readability. Periodically review and update access control policies to ensure they remain accurate and reflect the current state of your application; this helps to prevent stale or outdated policies from causing security issues.

Create Robust Testing

Before deploying policies to production environments, extensively test them. Automated testing tools and techniques like unit tests and integration tests can help validate policy behavior and ensure it meets requirements. In addition, implement robust logging and monitoring solutions, such as the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) or Splunk, to track authorization activity. Use this data to detect potential issues, analyze trends, and provide evidence for compliance audits.

Decoupled authorization is essential to modern software development, offering flexibility, scalability, and improved security. However, a business must understand and address the technical challenges of decoupled authorization to create robust and maintainable applications. Plan carefully and implement a solution that works for you and your organization; this will help you adapt to changing requirements and regulations more effectively.

Requirement Software development authentication security systems Integration

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Related

  • Designing for Security
  • What Is API-First?
  • How SecDevOps Adoption Can Help Save Costs in Software Development
  • Seamless Security Integration Strategies in Software Development

Partner Resources

×

Comments
Oops! Something Went Wrong

The likes didn't load as expected. Please refresh the page and try again.

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Support and feedback
  • Community research
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Core Program
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 3343 Perimeter Hill Drive
  • Suite 100
  • Nashville, TN 37211
  • support@dzone.com

Let's be friends:

Likes
There are no likes...yet! 👀
Be the first to like this post!
It looks like you're not logged in.
Sign in to see who liked this post!