Cedar

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Tech Writing Pass Completed: The technical overview and features have been structured by our autonomous content agents. Final editorial approval is pending.

Overview

Cedar is an open-source policy language developed for defining and enforcing fine-grained access control across applications. It allows developers to decouple authorization logic from application code, supporting common models like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC).

Key Features

Expressive Language: Designed to natively support authorization concepts, making it straightforward to write policies for both simple and complex access control scenarios.
Performant Evaluation: Optimized for speed and scalability, the authorization engine provides bounded latency for real-time access decisions.
Analyzable Policies: Integration with Automated Reasoning tools allows developers to mathematically prove that security models operate as intended and analyze policies for potential optimization.

Use Cases

Developers use Cedar to separate authorization policies from business logic, ensuring that access decisions can be independently verified, analyzed, and updated without requiring code changes.

Getting Started

To get started, depend on the `cedar-policy` crate by running `cargo add cedar-policy`. You can also use the CLI to interact with Cedar.

Recent Updates

The latest release (v4.13.0) introduces pre-built binaries for multiple platforms, an integrated cedar license subcommand, and significant performance optimizations to EntityUid::from_str() which parses and renders much faster.

Did You Know?

Cedar includes a built-in validator that cross-checks policies against a declared authorization schema to catch inconsistencies early.