Cerbos authorization for Auth0
Auth0 authenticates users and manages identity with Actions, Organizations, and role assignments. Cerbos uses those identity signals to make fine-grained authorization decisions, so your access control logic lives in policies, not in Auth0 rules or application code.
Organizations and roles
Use Auth0 Organizations for multi-tenant identity and pass organization roles directly into Cerbos policies
Actions-enriched claims
Enrich tokens with custom claims via Auth0 Actions, then reference them as principal attributes in Cerbos policies
Beyond Auth0 RBAC
Move past Auth0's built-in role checks to attribute-based policies that combine identity, resource, and request context
How Cerbos works with Auth0
Auth0 handles authentication, confirming who a user is. Cerbos handles authorization, deciding what that user can do. Together they give you a complete access control stack without coupling identity logic to business rules.
Cerbos lets you write fine-grained, context-aware authorization policies in human-readable YAML. Policies are decoupled from application code so product and security teams can update permissions without a release cycle.
Because Cerbos runs as a stateless Policy Decision Point (PDP) next to your application, authorization checks are sub-millisecond and scale horizontally with your infrastructure.
How Cerbos works with Auth0
- Users authenticate via Auth0, Auth0 handles login, MFA, and social connections. Auth0 Actions enrich the token with custom claims such as department, subscription tier, or organization role.
- Extract identity from the Auth0 token, Your application verifies the Auth0-issued JWT and extracts the user's roles, organization ID, and any custom claims added by Actions.
- Send identity and resource context to Cerbos, Pass the Auth0 user ID, roles, organization, and custom claims as principal attributes alongside the target resource and action to the Cerbos PDP.
- Cerbos evaluates policies and returns a decision, Cerbos evaluates your YAML policies against the Auth0 identity data and resource attributes, returning allow or deny. Your application enforces the result.
FAQ
How does Cerbos use Auth0 roles and permissions?
Auth0 assigns roles and permissions to users, which are included in the ID or access token. Cerbos receives these roles as principal attributes and evaluates them against your policies. Unlike Auth0's built-in RBAC, Cerbos policies can combine roles with resource attributes, time of day, IP address, or any other context to make fine-grained decisions.
Can I use Auth0 Organizations with Cerbos?
Yes. Auth0 Organizations provide multi-tenancy at the identity layer, each organization can have its own connection, branding, and member roles. Pass the organization ID and the user's organization role to Cerbos, and your policies can enforce tenant-specific authorization rules without any application code changes.
Do Auth0 Actions work with Cerbos?
Auth0 Actions let you enrich tokens with custom claims during the login flow, such as department, team, or subscription tier. These custom claims become principal attributes in Cerbos, giving your policies access to business context beyond standard OIDC claims.
Learn more about Cerbos
Related integrations
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Cerbos + Auth0
- Cerbos extends Auth0 roles with fine-grained, attribute-based permissions
- Policies defined in human-readable YAML, managed as code
- Authorization logic decoupled from application code
- Sub-millisecond policy evaluation via stateless PDP
Authorization for AI systems
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What is Cerbos?
Cerbos is an end-to-end enterprise authorization software for Zero Trust environments and AI-powered systems. It enforces fine-grained, contextual, and continuous authorization across apps, APIs, AI agents, MCP servers, services, and workloads.
Cerbos consists of an open-source Policy Decision Point, Enforcement Point integrations, and a centrally managed Policy Administration Plane (Cerbos Hub) that coordinates unified policy-based authorization across your architecture. Enforce least privilege & maintain full visibility into access decisions with Cerbos authorization.