oso VS OPA (Open Policy Agent)

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Not OP but Authentication is easy, authorization is a cross-cutting concern that often requires custom code. E.g., there are people and teams, both of which can have different kinds of access to something (read/write). Sometimes teams have sub-teams. Do the sub-teams have access to the parent teams' resources and/or vice versa? Also what kind of sharing are you going to support? Do people have to have an account to view stuff shared to them or can you just send a link? There are some efforts to make custom DSLs for describing authorization policies, to avoid cross-cutting code[1].

Computed fields require different treatment at every level of the stack. This isn't inherently hard, but it is an extra feature these low-code/no-code platforms need. Where things get difficult is inn migrations. It's common for a field that is computed at the beginning to become customizable, or for the computation to change. When that happens, what should the value be for old columns? Computed fields also often pull data from multiple other tables, which may require some combination of custom queries and database optimization.

[1] https://github.com/osohq/oso

Oso and OpenFGA are two alternatives that implement Zanzibar-style authorisation.

There's Oso as well

Well this was fun to see! I'm the CTO of Oso, where we're building Polar (the second of the links mentioned https://docs.osohq.com/).

I have a few really minor nitpicks, so will try and make up for it by adding to the discussion :)

First of all, it doesn't really make sense to talk about Datalog as a good language for authorization, because much like with Prolog there doesn't really exist a single implementation of it. OPA's language Rego is a datalog variant, and Polar started out as a Prolog variant (although it's not really recognisable as one any more).

And that's an important point because otherwise it would be pretty reasonable to decide that: logic programming is good for authorization => you should go find the most battle-tested language out there and use that. For example, there's SWI Prolog [1] and Scryer Prolog [2] as two of my favourites.

To me, the thing that is mind-blowing about logic programming, is (a) how powerful the paradigm is, and (b) how concisely you can implement a logic programming language. Take miniKanren [3] which is a full-blown logic language in a few hundred lines of code.

In my mind, the original article makes a decent case that logic programming is a good fit for authorization. And just generally I love anyone bringing attention to that :)

But to me, the reason logic programming is such a solid foundation for authorization logic is the pieces you can build on top of it. For Polar, we've added:

- Types! So you can write authorization logic over your data types and help structure your logic. We've implemented this by simply adding an additional operator into the language that can check types

First time hearing about rhai, but there's a project in that space called Oso that's authored in Rust and uses a different DSL than Rego. You may or may not find it appealing.

Authentication is probably the aspect of it that's the weakest. Authorization has a few nice libs, with Oso probably being the nicest, but authentication is mostly roll your own from what I've seen.

> Hopefully Oso open source their library.

https://github.com/osohq/oso seems to have the core, C FFI, and language bindings.

Thanks! PHP is a highly requested language for us and we've been rolling them out based on demand. You can vote for it if you want here https://github.com/osohq/oso/issues/791

Open Policy Agent is an open-source policy engine recently graduated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Developed by the community and maintained by Styra, the OPA project aims to offer a unified framework to define, manage, and enforce policies through policies-as-code (PaC) across the technology stack layers of cloud-native applications.

Open Policy Agent (OPA) helps us write policy as code using Rego, a declarative language designed specifically for this reason.

The open source projects Fastly uses and the foundations we partner with are vital to Fastly’s mission and success. Here's an unscientific list of projects and organizations supported by the Linux Foundation that we use and love include: The Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, containerd, eBPF, Falco, OpenAPI Initiative, ESLint, Express, Fastify, Lodash, Mocha, Node.js, Prometheus, Jenkins, OpenTelemetry, Envoy, etcd, Helm, osquery, Harbor, sigstore, cert-manager, Cilium, Fluentd, Keycloak, Open Policy Agent, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authority (C2PA), Flux, gRPC, Strimzi, Thanos, Linkerd, Let’s Encrypt, WebAssembly. And the list goes on!

OPA - https://www.openpolicyagent.org/

Bart: Our numerous podcast discussions with seasoned professionals show that GitOps has been a recurring theme in about 90% of our conversations. Almost every guest we've interviewed has emphasized its importance, often mentioning it as their primary tool alongside other essentials like cert manager, Kyverno, or OPA, depending on their preferences.

Yeah, I fully agree. The tooling for putting that much logic into the database is just not great. I've been decently happy with Sqitch[0] for DB change management, but even with that you don't really get a good basis for testing some of the logic you could otherwise test in isolation in app code.

I've also tried to rely heavily on the database handling security and authorization, but as soon as you start to do somewhat non-trivial attribute-/relationship-based authorization (as you would find in many products nowadays), it really isn't fun anymore, and you spend a lot of the time you saved on manually building backend routes on trying to fit you authz model into those basic primitives (and avoiding performance bottlenecks). Especially compares to other modern authz solutions like OPA[1] or oso[2] it really doesn't stack up.

[0]: https://github.com/sqitchers/sqitch

[1]: https://www.openpolicyagent.org

[2]: https://www.osohq.com

How can we handle this? Are there any mechanisms to prevent or at least to some extent safeguard this kind of issues without falling back to a manual workflow? There is. One huge advantage of sticking to (de-facto) standards like Terraform is that first we are probably not the first ones to come up with this question and second there is a huge ecosystem around Terraform that might help us with such challenges. And for this specific scenario the solution is the Open Policy Agent. Let us take a closer look how the solution could look like.

A popular Policy-as-Code tool for Terraform is OPA, everyone's favorite versatile open-source policy engine that enforces security and compliance policies across your cloud-native stack, making it easier to manage and maintain consistent policy enforcement in complex, multi-service environments.

Harness Policy As Code uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the central service to store and enforce policies for the different entities and processes across the Harness platform. In this section, you will define a policy that will deny a pipeline execution if there is no approval step defined in a deployment stage.