Authorization was always the gap. AI is making it impossible to ignore.
Over-permissioned access
AI agents and services can do more than they should. One mistake can expose sensitive data or trigger unauthorized actions.
AI agents blur identity lines
AI agents act on behalf of users through MCP clients and other interfaces, masking who initiated the action. When the system can’t tell them apart, agents inherit permissions they should never have.
Standing access never expires
Long-lived tokens and shared credentials stay valid long after they are needed, increasing the chance of compromise.
No fine-grained kill switch
If an agent goes beyond its scope, access continues until someone rotates credentials or restarts systems. No way to revoke a single action in seconds.
Access control for every use case
Single authorization management platform for every identity, every decision, at every layer.
Authorization software that scales with your business
ABAC
RBAC
ReBAC
PBAC
Runtime
Event-time
Admin-time
Audit-time
Cloud
Self-hosted
On-premise
Air-gapped
Non-human identities
Human identities
Workloads
Authorization loved by engineers and leadership
"We can trace every permission, investigate suspicious behavior, and answer questions about who did what, when, and why. We’ve gone from guesswork to forensic-level auditing across humans, machines, and everything in between."
Rob Crowe, Principal Engineer
100x faster launch
Deploy new roles and permissions instantly for RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, PBAC.
Enable AI adoption safely
Define what every AI agent can do and access. Revoke permissions in seconds.
Skip the 12 months build time
Eliminate the need to design, operate, and evolve authorization in-house.
Audit-ready logs
Log every allow/deny decision with fine-grained context. Full traceability across all identities.
Why Cerbos? To control what happens after login.
Your IdP authenticates. Your IGA provisions roles. Cerbos controls what identities are allowed to do, at the moment decisions are enforced.
See how Cerbos works for your team
Runtime authorization for Zero Trust
Be compliance-ready with every access decision, human or AI
Capture every decision for all identities
Log requests, actions, resources, access outcomes, and service-to-service authorization calls for both humans and machines.
Trace policy lineage
See the exact policy, version, and release behind each decision for complete traceability.
Monitor with context
Review detailed logs, policy versions, and real-time metrics across all PDPs and environments.
Simplify audits and compliance
Maintain centralized, structured logs on-premise to support audits and demonstrate readiness for FedRAMP, SOC 2&3, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR.
Cerbos plugs into your existing stack
Works with your existing tools, workflows, and infrastructure
Data and infrastructure
Enforce authorization across API gateways, data platforms, and infrastructure services.
AI infrastructure
Integrate fine grained policy based access control around AI systems.
SDKs
Use Cerbos SDKs for languages like JS, Python, Go, Rust, Java, and .NET to authorize requests from your application code.
IdPs
Connect to your existing identity providers for seamless authentication context.
End-to-end authorization platform
Policy management, data enrichment, access decisions, and enforcement in one solution
Authorization management
Cerbos Hub
Policy Administration Point
Cerbos Hub is the control plane for policy authoring, testing, versioning, distribution, and audit visibility. Hub provides end-to-end policy management out of the box.
Data and integration
Cerbos Synapse
Enrichment and Orchestration
Synapse fetches identity, resource, and relationship data from external systems to enrich authorization requests, and translates infrastructure protocols into Cerbos policy checks.
< 1 ms decision time
Cerbos PDP
Policy Decision Point
PDP is an open source authorization engine that evaluates requests against policies and returns access decisions. It's stateless, high-performance, and built to scale horizontally.
Native SDKs
Cerbos PEP SDK
Policy Enforcement Point
Cerbos PEPs are language-native client libraries that connect applications directly to PDPs to enforce real-time access decisions, with SDKs available for all major languages.
Recognized by the community
Award-winning technology, built for security and scale
With a strong open source foundation, AuthZEN compliance, and multiple industry awards, Cerbos has been recognized as a secure and reliable authorization software since 2021. Our CPO Alex Olivier co-chairs the OpenID AuthZEN working group.
Hackernoon Startup Awards 2025
Startups 100 Index 2025
API World 2025 Awards
Intellyx Digital Innovator 2023
Integrations with industry leading technologies
Fine-grained identity security
Why teams choose Cerbos
Policy based access control at scale
Purpose built authorization, not a generic policy engine
Generic policy engines |
Cerbos | |
|---|---|---|
Policy language | Policy language General-purpose policy languages designed for broader use cases. | Policy language YAML policies purpose-built for authorization, readable by security teams. |
Authorization model | Authorization model Authorization patterns must be assembled from generic primitives. | Authorization model First-class RBAC, ABAC, PBAC, and ReBAC with principal/resource/action semantics. |
Evaluation latency | Evaluation latency Varies by policy complexity and engine architecture. | Evaluation latency Sub-millisecond, optimized for per-request evaluation at machine speed. |
Policy lifecycle | Policy lifecycle Custom sync, manual distribution, separate CI/CD tooling. | Policy lifecycle Cerbos: managed policy lifecycle with CI/CD, testing, and real-time distribution. |
Audit and compliance | Audit and compliance Decision logs require additional infrastructure to capture and correlate. | Audit and compliance Structured decision logs with policy version lineage, built in. |
Externalized, policy-based, runtime authorization for your apps, enterprise software, AI systems and workflows.