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Cerbos

Cerbos is an open-core, language-agnostic, scalable authorization platform that decouples access control from application code by externalizing fine-grained, context-aware permission decisions into policy-as-code. Authorization is expressed in YAML policies supporting RBAC, ABAC, PBAC, and ReBAC, evaluated by a stateless Policy Decision Point (PDP) that delivers sub-millisecond decisions at scale. The platform consists of the open-source Cerbos PDP (Apache 2.0), Cerbos Hub control plane (PAP), Cerbos Synapse enrichment layer, and PEP SDKs for Go, Java, JavaScript / TypeScript, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Rust. The PDP exposes both REST (port 3592) and gRPC (port 3593) interfaces, an Admin API, and standards- compliant OpenID AuthZEN endpoints, with query-plan adapters for Prisma and SQLAlchemy.

6 APIs 19 Features
ABACAccess ControlAuthorizationAuthZENOpen SourcePBACPDPPermissionsPolicy as CodeRBACReBACZero Trust

APIs

Cerbos PDP REST API

The Cerbos PDP REST API is the HTTP/JSON interface for sending authorization requests to a running Cerbos Policy Decision Point. It exposes CheckResources for evaluating princip...

Cerbos PDP gRPC API

The Cerbos PDP gRPC API exposes the cerbos.svc.v1.CerbosService and related management services on port 3593, with server reflection enabled. The gRPC interface is the highest-p...

Cerbos AuthZEN API

Cerbos implements the OpenID AuthZEN authorization API specification, exposing standards-compliant single-evaluation, batch-evaluations, and well-known metadata endpoints so tha...

Cerbos PDP Admin API

The Cerbos Admin API provides management capabilities such as policy add/get/list, schema management, and audit log access on the running PDP. It is intended for administrative ...

Cerbos Hub API

Cerbos Hub is the cloud-hosted Policy Administration Point (PAP) that manages policy authoring, versioning, validation, and distribution to Cerbos PDPs across environments. It a...

Cerbos Synapse

Cerbos Synapse is the enrichment and orchestration component that fetches identity, resource, and relationship attributes from external systems and translates infrastructure pro...

Features

Policy as Code
YAML Policies
RBAC
ABAC
PBAC
ReBAC
Derived Roles
Sub-Millisecond Decisions
Stateless PDP
REST and gRPC APIs
AuthZEN Standard
Query Plan Generation
Audit Logs
Policy Versioning
Schema Validation
Multiple Storage Backends
Sidecar Deployment
Embedded PDP
Apache 2.0 License

Use Cases

Multi-Tenant SaaS Authorization
API Authorization
AI Agent Access Control
MCP Server Security
RAG Access Control
Non-Human Identity Authorization
Zero Trust Enforcement
Compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, PCI DSS)
Fintech Permissions
Healthcare Permissions

Integrations

Kong
Gravitee
Kubernetes
Envoy
Neo4j
Trino
Model Context Protocol
Anthropic
Chroma
Pinecone
Okta
Microsoft Entra ID
AWS Cognito
Keycloak
Auth0
Clerk
Stytch
WorkOS
Zitadel
Prisma
SQLAlchemy

Resources

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Website
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Documentation
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