Authorization

The process of verifying what specific applications, files, and data a user has access to.

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.