Panel: OpenID AuthZEN: Standards for Modern Authorization

Sign-on standards, such as SAML and OpenID Connect (OIDC), have paved the way for an interoperable identity fabric that has propelled the industry forward. It’s time for authorization to have its “OIDC moment.”


Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of a new architectural pattern - externalizing authorization logic out of applications, and treating it as a separate concern. Google, Netflix, Airbnb, Carta, Intuit, and others have shared their experiences around how they’ve built their internal authorization systems, helping seed a growing movement around modern authorization.

Most organizations, however, don’t have the luxury of building these systems from scratch. Fortunately, a new generation of authorization vendors have created innovative solutions that promise to democratize modern authorization. With that said, each of these solutions defines its own APIs. In much the same way identity standards such as OIDC brought about “single sign-on for the web”, authorization standards promise to reduce barriers to adoption, increase reusability, and mitigate risk for organizations that want to take advantage of this innovation.

To get this off the ground, a group of authorization practitioners and vendors, including those represented on this panel, submitted a charter proposal to the OpenID Foundation for the establishment of the AuthZEN working group. The charter was accepted shortly after IIW 37 in October 2023. Since then, the group has been developing use cases, cataloging authorization patterns, and drafting proposals such as an interop spec for a PEP-PDP protocol. These efforts will unify a set of disparate ecosystems into a larger authorization community, which will create a rising tide for the industry at large.

Join us to discuss the current state of modern authorization. We’ll also describe the progress we’ve made defining authorization patterns, documenting use-cases and how best to accomplish them, and reviewing the interoperability standards we have drafted.