Company
Date Published
Author
Damian Sieczkowski
Word count
1428
Language
English
Hacker News points
2

Summary

Google's solution to authorization, known as Google Zanzibar, aims to provide a modern approach that can scale with businesses while maintaining strict security requirements. It is a relationship-based access control system (ReBAC) that grants permissions based on the existence of relationships between digital objects and users. This approach has positive performance implications, especially for recursive permissions, and is intuitive for most developers. Google Zanzibar powers authorization across hundreds of Google Products and unlocks unique experiences like cross-product authorization checks. It addresses key challenges faced by companies, including inflexible permissions, siloed permissions, and the need for fine-grained authorization, user-defined roles, and recursive relationships. By adopting ReBAC systems like Google Zanzibar, businesses can enhance security and compliance, increase flexibility, and improve their overall digital experience.