Cedar: A New Language for Expressive, Fast, Safe, and Analyzable Authorization

This paper (2024) presents Cedar, AWS's new authorization policy language. By providing a clear declarative way to manage access control policies, Cedar addresses the common limitations of embedding authorization logic directly into application code: problems with correctness, auditing, and maintainence. Cedar introduces a domain-specific language (DSL) to express policies that are separate from application code, and improves readability and manageability. In that sense, this is like aspect-oriented programming but for authorization policy. The language is designed with four main objectives: expressiveness, performance, safety, and analyzability. Cedar balances these goals by supporting role-based (RBAC), attribute-based (ABAC), and relationship-based (ReBAC) access control models. Policy Structure and Evaluation Cedar policies consist of three primary components: effect, scope, and conditions. The effect can either be "permit" or "forbid", defining whether acc...