RBAC vs ABAC vs ReBAC: Pick a Stack, Not a Religion

Authorization systems are most effective when Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), and Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC) are treated as complementary tools rather than competing models. RBAC suits tenant-scoped organizational responsibilities such as administrators and billing managers, ABAC handles contextual conditions such as environment, sensitivity, approval limits, and request origin, and ReBAC addresses ownership, sharing, group membership, inheritance, and other object-specific relationships. The text warns that using roles to encode every exception leads to “role explosion,” while embedding authorization logic throughout application code creates inconsistent, difficult-to-audit permission checks. It recommends externalizing policy, evaluating it through a centralized policy decision layer, and retaining a stable application-facing authorization call such as can(principal, action, resource, context), regardless of which models determine the outcome. This hybrid approach is presented as improving least-privilege design, explainability, compliance reviews, data freshness, and the ability to evolve access policies across services, with Permit.io positioning its platform as infrastructure for managing these combined authorization models.

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