Implementing ReBAC Without Rebuilding Your Authorization

As applications grow and require more nuanced, relationship-driven permissions, traditional Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) often falls short, leading to "role explosion" and cumbersome attribute checks. This transition necessitates the adoption of Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC), which focuses on the relationships between users and resources rather than static roles. ReBAC, exemplified by Google's Zanzibar system, allows for fine-grained authorization by modeling permissions as a schema of types and relations, supporting dynamic environments where access follows ownership, membership, and delegation. Descope facilitates this transition from RBAC to ReBAC by enabling organizations to iteratively model existing latent relationships, define schemas of types and relations, and incrementally migrate data and authorization logic. This approach provides more structured, queryable, and auditable access controls, suitable for collaborative applications, multi-tenant platforms, and hierarchical systems, without the need for a complete overhaul of existing authorization models.

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