API Authorization

Overview

API authorization enforces what a verified user, application, or service is permitted to do. Checks may operate at endpoint, function, object, property, tenant, transaction, or workflow level and can incorporate roles, attributes, ownership, scopes, and risk conditions.

Common failures occur when an API trusts identifiers supplied by the client, checks only broad roles, exposes hidden fields, or applies different rules across similar endpoints. Authentication alone does not prevent one valid user from accessing another user’s data.

Authorization should be centralized where practical, deny by default, and execute server-side for every request. Tests must cover horizontal and vertical privilege escalation, while logs should record sensitive grants, denials, policy changes, and exceptional administrative access.

For API Authorization, teams should measure unnecessary friction, exclusion, delay, privacy intrusion, failed recovery, and inconsistent treatment while preserving the safeguards needed for material application and service exposure.

API Authorization enforces which authenticated principals may invoke particular operations or access particular objects, fields, and tenant data.

API authorization determines which endpoints, objects, fields, and actions an authenticated identity may access under defined policies and context. API authorization must protect each object and action, because a valid login does not justify access to every available resource.

For API Authorization, the trust decision should establish API authorization determines which endpoints, objects, fields, and actions an authenticated identity may access under defined policies and context and bind the result to the requested action and protected resource. Teams should test issuance, storage, validation, expiry, revocation, recovery, and privileged override for permissions and protected actions, rather than checking only a successful request. Logs concerning the API permission decision and permissions and protected actions should support investigation without exposing reusable secrets or unnecessary personal data.