Topaz Solution Brief: Modernizing Application Authorization with Policy-as-Code

1. The Challenge: Overcoming Brittle, Hardcoded Authorization

Embedding authorization logic directly within application code is a pervasive architectural anti-pattern that systematically erodes engineering velocity and expands the attack surface. This approach tightly couples security policies to the application’s release cycle, creating a brittle system where any change to a permission model requires a full rebuild and redeployment. This not only hinders agility but also creates security vulnerabilities that are difficult to track, manage, and audit at scale.

For technical leaders, this traditional model presents several acute pain points. The inability to update access policies without a complex deployment process makes responding to new security requirements a costly and time-consuming endeavor. It results in a fragmented and opaque security posture, with no centralized view of permissions across a growing portfolio of microservices. Consequently, the cost and complexity of auditing this scattered logic become prohibitively high, leaving the organization exposed to compliance and security risks.

To address these fundamental challenges, organizations require a modern, decoupled architecture that separates authorization logic from application code.

2. The Solution: Decoupled, Cloud-Native Authorization with Topaz

Topaz emerges as the strategic solution to the rigidities of embedded authorization. It is an open-source, cloud-native authorization service that enables a robust “policy-as-code” workflow, empowering teams to manage access control with the same rigor and agility they apply to their application code.

By integrating OPA’s declarative policy engine with a Zanzibar-inspired relationship graph, Topaz delivers both highly contextual, attribute-based logic and high-performance, relationship-based permissions in a single, unified system. It externalizes authorization decisions, treating policy as a separate, manageable artifact that can be developed, versioned, and deployed independently of the core application. This architectural shift unlocks new levels of speed, security, and scalability. This is accomplished through a set of core capabilities designed for cloud-native performance and security.

3. Core Capabilities for Agile and Secure Access Control

The strategic value of Topaz is delivered through three core design principles: model flexibility, centralized policy management, and high-performance local evaluation. The following subsections deconstruct each of these foundational capabilities.

3.1. Fine-Grained, Evolvable Authorization Models

Topaz enables the decoupling of the authorization model from the application lifecycle. Teams can begin with a straightforward multi-tenant Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model and seamlessly evolve to incorporate more sophisticated Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC), or any combination thereof. This evolution is achieved by modifying the policy and data model—not by rewriting application code—ensuring the authorization system can adapt to meet future business requirements without expensive refactoring.

3.2. Policy-as-Code for a Secure Supply Chain

By decoupling authorization logic into its own artifact, Topaz establishes a true policy-as-code workflow. This allows security and development teams to collaborate on access policies using standard development practices like version control, code review, and automated testing. Critically, these authorization policies can be built into immutable, signed OCI images. This practice transforms policy into a secure, verifiable component of the software supply chain, ensuring that only trusted and validated access rules are deployed into production.

3.3. Real-Time, Low-Latency Decisions

Topaz is engineered for high-performance environments where latency is critical. It is deployed adjacent to the application, storing user, object, and relationship data in an embedded database. This architecture ensures lightning-fast authorization decisions by eliminating network hops to a remote service. Topaz optimizes query evaluation over this local object graph, providing real-time access control without compromising application performance.

Together, these capabilities deliver a unified control plane for authorization, transforming access control from a recurring development bottleneck into a strategic enabler for secure, scalable product delivery.

4. Flexible Policy Implementation in Practice

A key differentiator for an authorization system is its ability to express a wide range of business rules with clarity and precision. The Topaz policy language is designed for this flexibility, allowing developers to model complex, real-world authorization requirements. The following examples provide a glimpse into its practical application.

RBAC Policy Example This policy checks if a user has the “viewer” relation to a specific tenant object, a common pattern in multi-tenant applications.

ABAC Policy Example This policy grants access based on a user attribute (being in the “Sales” department) and environmental context (the current day is a workday).

ReBAC Policy Example This policy checks if a user has a specific can_read relationship with a document object, a foundational query in a Relationship-Based Access Control model.

These examples demonstrate the platform’s adaptability, allowing teams to enforce simple or deeply contextual access control rules with a consistent and declarative policy language.

5. Architecture and Integration

Topaz is architected for seamless integration and minimal operational overhead within existing cloud-native ecosystems. It operates as a service deployed directly within your cloud infrastructure, where it connects to your existing data sources to synchronize the identity, resource, and relationship data needed to make authorization decisions.

To ensure rapid adoption, Topaz provides extensive support and resources for popular languages and frameworks, including: Node.js, Go, Python, Java, ASP.NET, and Ruby. This broad support ensures your teams can begin securing services immediately, regardless of their technology stack.

6. Get Started with Topaz

Adopting a modern authorization strategy is a critical step in building secure, scalable, and agile applications. You can begin exploring Topaz and the policy-as-code workflow today.

For an immediate start, install the Topaz CLI using the following command: brew tap aserto-dev/tap && brew install topaz.

By decoupling authorization from application code, your organization can achieve a more secure, maintainable, and agile access control strategy fit for the cloud-native era.