warrant-demo-app-ts VS Ory Keto

We’re Aditya and Karan, the co-founders of Warrant (https://warrant.dev/). We build APIs and infrastructure that helps developers implement authorization and access control in their apps.

Implementing flexible authorization that grows with your application is difficult. Many products only need authentication early on but eventually require authorization; however, adding complex authorization to a mature, high usage product is even harder. We’re building Warrant to better abstract the complexity of authorization and reduce implementation cost and maintenance drag for engineering teams.

Warrant abstracts your authorization rules and access control logic outside of your application so it isn’t coupled to core business logic. We adopted concepts from Google Zanzibar to make Warrant flexible enough to support any access control model. Authorization rules are easy to enforce in backend and frontend code at runtime through simple API calls. Both developers and non-technical users can modify access rules through our dashboard to change application behavior without needing to change code.

We’re taking a service-driven approach to authorization. As companies get bigger and build out multiple services, authorization logic needs to be re-implemented in the new services or some central service. Whether you’re a small startup with a monolith or a company with many microservices, we think decoupling your authorization and having a dedicated authorization service is the right approach. Check out our demo app (https://github.com/warrant-dev/warrant-demo-app-ts) for an end-to-end example of how to use Warrant.

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.