Identity and access have always been joined at the hip. In the age of LDAP, authenticated users were granted permissions based on group membership. But this mechanism hasn’t transferred into the federated identity landscape.
Instead, modern identity systems try to generalize permissions into scopes that are embedded into access tokens. But this doesn’t facilitate fine-grained authorization - a “read:document” scope doesn’t typically mean the user can access every document!
While identity has moved to the cloud, we still don’t have fine-grained, scalable mechanisms for generalizing authorization. So every application builds its own, and IT ends up administering every application differently.
Fixing this is arguably the most pressing challenge for the IAM industry. In this talk, we propose a set of principles, inspired by zero-trust and the latest work in cloud-native authorization, that should underlie the solutions we build:
