# Authorization Authorization is the process of determining what permissions an authenticated user or system has. While authentication verifies identity, authorization controls what actions that identity is allowed to perform. It answers the question "what are you allowed to do?" Authorization models include role-based access control (RBAC), where permissions are assigned to roles and users are assigned to roles; attribute-based access control (ABAC), which evaluates policies based on user attributes, resource attributes, and environmental conditions; and scope-based access, commonly used in OAuth 2.0 to limit what a token can access. In API management, authorization is typically enforced at the gateway level or within backend services. An API gateway can check whether a request's token contains the required scopes or roles before forwarding it. This provides a consistent policy enforcement point and reduces the risk of misconfigured access controls in individual services. Fine-grained authorization logic often still resides in the backend where business context is available. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.serverlessapigateway.com/glossary/a/authorization.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.