AuthZen

Definitions

AuthZEN is an initiative within the OpenID Foundation aimed at standardizing authorization mechanisms to improve interoperability, scalability, and security across different systems.

Context

AuthZEN focuses on defining common authorization patterns, protocols, and formats to facilitate secure communication between authorization components. It seeks to address the fragmentation in authorization standards, much like how OAuth2 and OpenID Connect standardized authentication.

Uses of AuthZEN Standardized Authorization API – Provides a universal format for authorization requests and responses, improving compatibility between different systems.

Interoperability Across Frameworks – Enables enforcement points (PEPs) to work with various policy decision points (PDPs), regardless of the underlying authorization model.

Fine-Grained Access Control – Supports RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC models, allowing organizations to implement dynamic, context-aware authorization.

Improved Security & Compliance – Helps organizations externalize authorization, reducing reliance on embedded entitlements in OAuth2 bearer tokens.

AuthZEN is still evolving, but its goal is to simplify authorization deployment across SaaS applications, cloud environments, and enterprise systems.

Problems

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