ABAC with Monorepo Microservices: What is the best approach?

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At my work, I have a task to search and find solutions to implement the ABAC authorization in our microservices organized in a monorepo. We have some products and we use the concept of realms to organize the different client's data in the same database. Here our requirements are likely:

  • An user, which is a manager of his company, can only see data from your company and from your employees.
  • The same company can have N places, where each can have a manager. The manager of each place can only see the data from there.

First I thought to build some code to be used in every router of every API to verify the authorization and allow or deny the request. Something like this: enter image description here

The other thing I thought was to create an API instead of a lib. enter image description here

So, based on this question, I discovered that ABAC can be externalized from the apps (APIs) and make a lot of sense to me, see the image below.

enter image description here

But then I have some questions.

  1. Is bad to do what I thought in the first image or in the second?

  2. How the PDP will know what the user wants to do? Based on the route he is calling? But with this approach, the single responsibility will be hurt as the PDP needs to internalize (step 2) what other apps do, right?

  3. The PIP needs to call the database for the PDP validates the authorization. So this can be slow as the same query will be done 2x, one for checking the policy and the other inside the service with business logic.

abac monorepo microservices authorization
1 Answers

  1. The modern way of doing this is by decoupling your policy and code - i.e. having a seperate microservice for Authorization - here's a part in a talk I gave at OWASP DevSlop about it. You'd want you code in the middleware to be as simple as possible - basically just querying the Authorization microservice. That service basically becomes your PDP (in XACML terms).  This is true for both monolith and microservices (the assumption is you'll end up having more microservices next to your monolith anyhow). 
    To implement the Authorization microservice / PDP you can use something like OPA (OpenPolicyAgent.org) and then use OPAL as a PAP and manager for PIPs. (Full disclosure I'm a contributor to both OPA and OPAL)

  2. The query to the PDP should include what the user is doing (but not what the rules are). You can do this based on the Route (common when doing service-mesh), but often it's better to define a resource/action layout which becomes part of the query and is independent directly of the application route. Take a look at the Permit.io Policy-Editor which does exactly that kind of mapping. (Permit also uses both OPA and OPAL internally; Full disclosure I'm one of the founders of Permit.io )

  3. Very good point. You don't want your PDP to constantly be querying other sources per incoming query to it (though its okay if you do it for a few edge cases) - What you want is to load data gradually in the background in an asynchronous fashion. Ideally in an event-driven fashion (i.e. have events propagate in realtime from the data sources into the PDP). This is exactly what you can do with OPAL.

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