Fine-grained gateway-enforced authorization with OpenID AuthZEN

Omri Gazitt, Co-founder and CEO at Aserto, discussed the complexities of fine-grained authorization in APIs and gateways at the Tyk LEAP 2.0 API governance conference, highlighting the challenges and innovations in this field. While authentication has established standards like OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0, authorization remains less mature with significant security concerns, such as broken access control, identified by OWASP. Gazitt emphasizes learning from tech giants like Google and Netflix to establish cloud-native authorization practices, moving away from traditional coarse-grained methods to fine-grained, policy-based, and real-time permissions. The cloud-native ecosystem includes attribute-based access control (ABAC) and relationship-based access control (ReBAC), with AuthZEN aiming to standardize these approaches. Gazitt also discusses the role of API gateways in enforcing authorization policies in real-time, reflecting a shift towards more precise and efficient authorization mechanisms in modern application development.