[ogazitt]

That's indeed why authorization is a harder problem than authentication - because much of it is domain-specific.

Still, there are many things an authorization system can help with. For example, the service/organization affiliation of the user is easily expressed as a set of attributes / properties / roles on the user. If that's stored in a central directory, and the authorizer has a cached copy, you can use this context as part of your policy for making authorization decisions.

Lifting the authorization policy into a central repo allows you to consolidate authorization logic, and also enables separation of concerns. SecOps can evolve the authorization policy of the application without having to ask developers to revisit the logic in all the places it exists. In fact, we have customers that have their secops team deploy new versions of the authorization policy without having to redeploy the application.

Another example is having front-end code that can dynamically render component state (visible or enabled) based on the same authorization rules that the back-end / API uses. We have nice examples of this in our "peoplefinder" demo [0], which you can launch as a quickstart [1].

[0] https://github.com/aserto-demo/peoplefinder

[1] https://www.aserto.com/quickstarts