Ory Keto VS Ory Oathkeeper

One of Ory’s core competencies is permissions. We built the first Google Zanzibar implementation in the world and it’s part of Ory Network‘s global multi-region platform (https://github.com/ory/keto)

A push model is also valid if you’re heavy on policies and can accept eventual consistency. We will investigate how to generally push things to the edge (like we did with Ory Edge Sessions) or to cryptographic verification wherever staleness is acceptable.

By solving the primitives correctly in the beginning (with a multi region architecture) that job does become a lot easier, which is what we decided doing at Ory :)

slightly off-topic, but related to what ory is doing in general. How do you usually do authorization-aware search?

Imagine, I have a bunch of Google docs and using https://github.com/ory/keto for authorization. I can quickly answer the question "does user X have access to document Y", but it is not easy to do "search all documents with word Hello in it, for which I have access" because access can be granted through nested groups (give read access to everyone in DepartmentA, and I am part of child department)

if you want to integrate an existing framework see if https://github.com/ory/keto solves your problems, there are similiar frameworks that support ABAC

Shameless plug for Ory Keto, probably the best reference implementation IMO https://github.com/ory/keto

Looks cool, wonder how it compares to Keto and Casbin.

How does Warrant compare to other Zanzibar based solutions like Ory Keto ?https://github.com/ory/keto

Interesting to see another project open sourced around Google Zanzibar. On a timeline for context:

- Ory came out first with Ory Keto ( https://github.com/ory/keto ) which is trying to be a close adaptation of the paper. Initially, many concepts were missing but they are making a lot of progress with the DSL and it interfaces with the rest of Ory (OAuth2, User Mangement)

- Authzed came out as a SaaS only, open sorucing the code base later on at https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

- Auth0 has been playing around with Zanzibar concepts in various forms and published a beta service at https://dashboard.fga.dev - apparently now also open source parts of it similar to what Authzed did: https://github.com/openfga

- Permify - who on a side note spammed me quite a lot with outreach because I was active in these communities - joins as well https://github.com/Permify/permify

It's exciting to see so much movement, yet also sad that so many companies are brewing their own beer instead of working collaborative on the more succesful projects. Feels like we'll just end up with one or two successful projects (looking at Ory / Auth0 here) with the rest perishing. I'm wondering if there truly is a business model for just this permission system as a saas service (looks like this is what everyone is going with). Here I'm giving Auth0 probably the biggest plus as they have an established identity service. Then again, Okta (parent of Auth0) and Auth0 themselves are not particularly known for good business practices that we usually expect from developer tooling.

What's refreshing though with Permify is that they are trying a bit of a different approach to Zanzibar!

Er, Ory Keto is written in Go.

Hydra feels mature. I think it's their longest-developed product so far. Besides breaking changes during big upgrades(v0 -> v1beta -> v1), everything has been painless:

- It runs anywhere with or without containers

- API makes sense, good SDKs are available in all my used languages

- RAM usage is surprisingly low compared to usage and has been great for resource-constrained environments

- Stateless means horizontal scaling is as easy as `replicas++`

- Sub-millisecond response times for some calls, much faster than our previous setup

With Hydra, I know it's the client's fault when OAuth calls fail and not just a buggy server implementation. This is reinforced in dev mode with great errors like:

- The authorization code has already been used

- The request is missing the response_type parameter

- Parameter "nonce" must be set when using the implicit flow

- Redirect URL "https://example.com/callback" does not match

On the flipside, Oathkeeper is not a mature product and has not yet reached v1. There are breaking changes planned [1]. It lacks support for at least one popular usecase (mine) out of the box [2]. Rules can be hard to create and debug. I wouldn't recommend Oathkeeper in its current state unless you're ready to dive in and fix things yourself. Once configured it sticks with the Ory trend: fast, lean, and stable.

Depending on your usecase, Oathkeeper could be swapped out with any IAP like Pomerium or just with your reverse proxy's auth request support + some small custom shim.

I haven't tried Keto (access control) or Kratos (user management) yet. Kratos is on my todo list.

[1] https://github.com/ory/oathkeeper/issues/441