4 posts tagged with "guides"

Over the last couple years, authorization (AKA “authz”) has become a hot topic of debate. Proponents of various authz frameworks, libraries, and philosophies have voiced their opinions on how it should be implemented, jockeying for position to become the de facto way to implement authz. Among the contestants in this debate, Google’s Zanzibar has recently emerged as a popular way of not only modeling and enforcing authorization for modern, fine grained use cases, but also of scaling to meet the requirements of today’s large-scale, cloud-native applications.

Introduction​

When tasked with adding authorization & access control to an application, one of the first decisions many developers make is whether to store their application's access control policies in policy files (policy as code) or in a database (policy as data). This decision is dictated by the business & operational needs of the application and is often made indirectly when choosing to use a library or implement a custom access control system from scratch. In this post, we'll cover the pros and cons of both approaches and discuss ideal use-cases for each.

Insecure Direct Object Reference (shortened as IDOR) is one of the most common forms of broken access control which OWASP recently listed as the number one application security issue in 2021. A quick search for "IDOR" on Hacker One's Hacktivity feed shows that many top tech companies (and even the U.S. Department of Defense) have fallen victim to IDOR, in some cases paying out well over $10,000 per bug bounty. In this post, I'll explain what IDOR is, what causes it, and ways to protect your application against it.

Access Control is the process of allowing (or disallowing) user access to specific resources or actions in a software system. For example, only allowing certain users access to internal admin pages on a website or only allowing paying users access to a premium feature. There are many approaches to implementing Access Control, but Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is one of the most popular and widely used. In this guide, we'll cover a standard way to implement RBAC and discuss some best practices for implementing Access Control in APIs and web applications.