The Pressure Behind Identity's Diseconomies of Scale
Eve Maler argues that identity's apparent diseconomies of scale are really about gnarliness, not size. That gnarliness has a shape I drew for chapter 19 of my forthcoming book: the gap between a growing decision surface and the infrastructure meant to govern it. That gap is authorization pressure, and it explains why identity gets harder even when a team does everything right.
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The Shape of Context in Agentic Authorization
In agentic systems, the principal, action, and resource are often unknown until the moment an agent acts, and the context that governs the decision arrives as a flood of signals from many sources. This post looks at how that context takes shape, where each signal is actually consumed, and why a non-directed world of agents still needs decisions that humans can inspect and predict.
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It's Not Just What Agents Can Do...It's When They Can Do It!
Agents don't just perform actions; they execute plans where the safety of each step depends on what has already happened. That makes sequencing an authorization problem. This post explores how policy, delegation data, and multi-signature approval can govern the order in which agents receive authority, not just the scope of it.
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It's Not Just What Agents Can Do...It's When They Can Do It!
Agents don't just perform actions; they execute plans where the safety of each step depends on what has already happened. That makes sequencing an authorization problem. This post explores how policy, delegation data, and multi-signature approval can govern the order in which agents receive authority, not just the scope of it.
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Agentic AI and Dynamic Authorization: A Series Recap
I've been exploring how policy, delegation, and continuous authorization can make agentic AI systems useful without making them ungovernable. This post ties together eight essays that trace that journey from foundational ideas to practical patterns.
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Agentic AI and Dynamic Authorization: A Series Recap
I've been exploring how policy, delegation, and continuous authorization can make agentic AI systems useful without making them ungovernable. This post ties together eight essays that trace that journey from foundational ideas to practical patterns.
Continue reading...
Cross-Domain Delegation in a Society of Agents
Cross-domain delegation requires more than transferring a credential. In a society of agents, policies define boundaries, promises communicate intent derived from those policies, credentials carry delegated authority, and reputation allows trust to emerge through repeated interactions.
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Cross-Domain Delegation in a Society of Agents
Cross-domain delegation requires more than transferring a credential. In a society of agents, policies define boundaries, promises communicate intent derived from those policies, credentials carry delegated authority, and reputation allows trust to emerge through repeated interactions.
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Delegation as Data: Applying Cedar Policies to OpenClaw Subagents
Intra-domain delegation enables an agent to grant constrained authority to subagents without expanding the system’s trust boundary. In the OpenClaw + Cedar demo, delegation is modeled as data and enforced by a stable policy set, preserving policy integrity while allowing dynamic scoping of power.
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Delegation as Data: Applying Cedar Policies to OpenClaw Subagents
Intra-domain delegation enables an agent to grant constrained authority to subagents without expanding the system’s trust boundary. In the OpenClaw + Cedar demo, delegation is modeled as data and enforced by a stable policy set, preserving policy integrity while allowing dynamic scoping of power.
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Childproofing the Control Plane: Using Cedar to Build Frontal Lobes for Agentic Systems
Connecting an agent like OpenClaw to Home Assistant can make home automation more adaptive and intelligent, but it also introduces real risks if authority is not clearly bounded. By externalizing decision logic into deterministic Cedar policies, we can create governed autonomy that allows agents to act usefully while preventing them from crossing safety, security, and privacy boundaries.
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Childproofing the Control Plane: Using Cedar to Build Frontal Lobes for Agentic Systems
Connecting an agent like OpenClaw to Home Assistant can make home automation more adaptive and intelligent, but it also introduces real risks if authority is not clearly bounded. By externalizing decision logic into deterministic Cedar policies, we can create governed autonomy that allows agents to act usefully while preventing them from crossing safety, security, and privacy boundaries.
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Beyond Denial: Using Policy Constraints to Guide OpenClaw Planning
OpenClaw agents plan, adapt, and act over time, so authorization that functions merely as a reactive gate isn't the best architecture. In this post, I show how integrating Cedar's query constraints and Typed Partial Evaluation lets OpenClaw discover what is allowed before acting. The result is an agent that plans within policy-defined boundaries while still enforcing every concrete action at runtime.
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Beyond Denial: Using Policy Constraints to Guide OpenClaw Planning
OpenClaw agents plan, adapt, and act over time, so authorization that functions merely as a reactive gate isn't the best architecture. In this post, I show how integrating Cedar's query constraints and Typed Partial Evaluation lets OpenClaw discover what is allowed before acting. The result is an agent that plans within policy-defined boundaries while still enforcing every concrete action at runtime.
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A Policy-Aware Agent Loop with Cedar and OpenClaw
This article demonstrates how to move authorization inside the agent loop by inserting a Cedar-backed policy decision point into OpenClaw, so that every tool invocation is evaluated at runtime. Instead of acting as a one-time gate, authorization becomes a continuous feedback signal that guides replanning and enforces Zero Trust principles for agentic systems.
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Why Authorization Is the Hard Problem in Agentic AI
Agentic AI systems expose the limits of static authorization models, which assume permissions can be decided once and remain valid over time. As agents plan, act, and replan, authorization must become a continuous feedback signal that constrains behavior at each step rather than a one-time gate. Dynamic, policy-based authorization enables delegation to be enforced through purpose, scope, conditions, and duration, turning denial into a productive signal that guides replanning instead of a terminal failure.
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From Architecture to Accountability: How AI Helps Policy Become Practice
Architecture alone does not make authorization trustworthy. Over time, access control only works if intent can be understood, traced, and shown to produce legitimate outcomes in real systems. This post explores how AI can support the governance of access control by helping teams connect policy intent to effective access, producing coherent evidence that policy behaves the way it is meant to.
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Authorization Before Retrieval: Making RAG Safe by Construction
Retrieval-augmented generation makes language models far more useful by grounding them in real data, But it also raises a hard question: who is allowed to see what? This post shows how authorization can be enforced before retrieval, ensuring that RAG systems remain powerful without becoming dangerous.
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What AI Can Tell You About Your Authorization Policies
AI shouldn't decide who can access what, but it can help you understand what the system already allows. Used as an auditor or reviewer, AI becomes a lens for exposing scope, risk, and undocumented assumptions in authorization systems.
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Policy Authoring and Analysis with AI
AI doesn’t belong in the business of deciding who can access what, but it can be an effective partner in reasoning about authorization policies. When used inside clear guardrails, AI helps humans author, analyze, and refine policies without taking over access decisions.
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AI Is Not Your Policy Engine (And That's a Good Thing)
If your access control lives in a prompt, it isn’t access control. Authorization decisions must be deterministic and enforced before an LLM ever sees data. Treating AI as a policy engine is a category error with real consequences.
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Early Access to Dynamic Authorization
The first six chapters of my new book, Dynamic Authorization: Adaptive Access Control, are now available in Manning’s Early Access Program. The book explores why authorization is still misunderstood, and how new tools like Cedar enable secure, flexible systems that also improve employee and customer experience.
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Why Do Policy Languages Feel So Hard?
Policy languages can feel intimidating due to unfamiliar syntax, poor tooling, and the high stakes of getting access control wrong. But once understood, they simplify application logic and make security more reliable and maintainable.
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Zero Trust, Least Privilege, and Just-in-Time Access
When dynamic access control with JIT access is thoughtfully implemented, you shift the burden of security from employees to systems that automate protection, making it proactive and intelligent.
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The Business Case for Dynamic Authorization
Access management is seen by many business leaders as primarily a means of protecting and securing computer systems. Important, but of secondary importance to the business. But as computer systems come to intermediate almost every interaction the business has with employees, contractors, partners, and customers, dynamic authorization should be seen as a strategic business enabler. Investing in a robust, flexible, and pervasive authorization infrastructure can drive revenue growth, operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and competitive differentiation. Reducing Operational Costs Manually managing access using rigid, static authorization models like ACLs and groups is labor-intensive and prone to errors. Organizations that rely
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Authorization Matters
I've become very interested in the topic of authorization over the last year and plan to write about it more. I hope you'll follow along.
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Web 2.0 is Collapsing Under its Own Weight
The overhead of performing even simple tasks online is getting larger and larger. I question the security of almost all these supposedly "secure" messaging systems. And I'm tired of the 'Utopia of Rules' mindset pervasive in every organization. It's exhausting how they expect customers to constantly adapt to their needs.
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Zero Trust with Zero Data
The physical world is full of zero trust examples, but they gather attributes for the access control decisions in a very different way than we're used to online.
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Zero Trust
My new book Learning Digital Identity from O'Reilly Media covers many of the topics in this post such as multi-factor authentication, authorization and access control, and identity policy development in depth. Zero Trust is a security framework that is better attuned to the modern era of sophisticated threats and interconnected systems. Past practices included techniques like virtual private networks (VPNs) that tried to emulate the idea of an intranet where trusted computers and people were protected from hackers by a firewall that "kept the bad stuff out." As more and more work has gone remote and personal devices like
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Not all PBAC is ABAC: Access Management Patterns
Exploring the architectural patterns we can use with policy-based access control (PBAC) illustrates the difference between policy-based and attribute-based access control (ABAC).
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Authorization, Workflow, and HATEOAS
Workflow can be seen as a way of doing authentication. This blog post discusses how API access management is done and why workflow should be part of that.
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Self Sovereign Authorities and the Epic Struggle for IoT
I finished reading three things this week that all tied together in my mind and so I wanted to mention them. One is a full-length book, but the other two are short essays. This post describes them and my thoughts about how they relate to my earlier post on the CompuServe of Things.
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Authorization Models and Delegation
I promised yesterday that I'd talk a little more about our discussion on delegation. I've since had a profitable discussion with Devlin and Bryant as well. The problem with delegation is that it requires something that has eluded organizations since computer security first became an issue: how do you build good authorization models? Most applications are built without much prior thought to the authorization model and then it gets slapped on afterwards. For organizations, it's even worse. The business has fuzzy ideas about authorizations and they change them all the time. "Oh, we're spending too much money on catering;
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Separating Authentication and Authorization
Yesterday I was talking to Kelly Flanagan, BYU's CIO about the OpenID enabled wiki we have for the Internet Identity Workshop. I'd love to see BYU put an OpenID server on top of their directory. That way I could easily have my students authenticating on my wikis and blogs. Of course, BYU has all kinds of APIs for doing this, but I have use certain development environments, have permission, etc. Solutions like OpenID are much more loosely coupled. Our discussion ultimately got down the distinction between authentication and authorization. OpenID is a pure authentication system. It doesn't even support
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Algorithmic Authorizations
Yesterday I was reading Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth and Scott D. Anthony and came across a story about how credit scoring changed the loan industry: In 1956, Fair, Issac created a standard predictive risk-assessment tool. It dramatically simplified the process of judging creditworthiness with a statistical methodology that plugged variables from an applicants credit history into an algorithmic formula that produced a score. Credit scoring's robust, scientifically based, quick assessment enabled a broader population of less-skilled people to make lending decisions. It occurred to me
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