Authorization Policy

An authorization policy defines what resources a user or group can access within an organization. When applying an authorization policy, factors like access management to on-premises or cloud services, authentication flows, and device identity introduce complexity that only scales with organization size.

Pomerium meets you where you are by allowing you to configure granular policies that support or extend your existing policies on a per-route, per-request basis.

Pomerium authorization policy

You can apply policies in Pomerium to Namespaces or Routes.

Namespaces

Pomerium Enterprise

Namespace support is available only for Enterprise customers.

Administrators can create a namespace, add users, groups, and routes to it, and configure a policy that applies to that specific namespace.

Routes

You can build TLS-encrypted routes to upstream applications and configure policy that restricts access based on the policy criteria.

Pomerium Enterprise and Core customers can configure and apply policies to routes.

Continuous verification

Pomerium continuously evaluates policy on every request.

Policy applied to any route or namespace will enforce authorization checks throughout a session, ensuring that only the intended user with the right context can access a protected resource.

Apply authorization policy

Pomerium offers three methods to configure and apply policies:

• Pomerium Policy Language (PPL)
• Enterprise Console GUI
• Rego

Pomerium Policy Language (PPL)

Pomerium Policy Language (PPL) is a declarative, YAML-based access control policy language you can use to configure authorization policies.

PPL is intuitive by design and defines policy with one or more rules composed of actions, logical operators, and criteria. Each criterion has a name and corresponding data.

Core

In Pomerium Core, you can build a policy with PPL and apply it to a route in your configuration file:

policy:
  - allow:
      or:
        - email:
            is: user@example.com

In this example, only a user with the email user@example.com can access the target application.

Enterprise

In the Enterprise Console, you can use the EDITOR to manually configure policy with PPL:

In this example, Pomerium will grant a user access if their email address ends in example.com and their groups ID matches 00gso9nxonHI4YfbM4x6. Pomerium will deny the user access on Saturdays and Sundays.

Enterprise Console GUI

Pomerium Enterprise

The Enterprise Console provides a policy builder GUI so you can build policies and reapply them to multiple routes and namespaces. See our Enterprise page to learn more.

Use the BUILDER tab to build your policy:

In this example, a user will have access if their email address ends in example.com and their device ID matches the ID in the Value field.

Reapply policies

Reapply policies as necessary to any route or namespace:

Rego support

Pomerium supports policies expressed in Rego for organizations that prefer to use OPA.

See the Outputs, Inputs, and Functions reference sections below to learn how they apply to policy evaluation.

Outputs

Authorization policy written in Rego is expected to return results in allow and/or deny rules:

# a policy that always allows access
allow := true

# a policy that always denies access
deny := true

Pomerium grants access according to the same rules as PPL:

Only two actions are supported: allow and deny. deny takes precedence over allow. More precisely: a user will have access to a route if at least one allow rule matches and no deny rules match.

allow and deny rules support four forms:

1. A simple boolean:

allow := true

2. An array with a single boolean value:

deny := [true]

3. An array with two values: a boolean and a reason:

allow := [false, "user-unauthorized"]

4. An array with three values: a boolean, a reason, and additional data:

allow := [false, "user-unauthorized", { "key": "value" }]

The reason value is useful for debugging, since it appears in authorization logs. There are two special reasons that trigger functionality in Pomerium:

• user-unauthenticated indicates that the user needs to sign in, and results in a redirect to the Authenticate service
• device-unauthenticated indicates that the user needs to register a new device

Inputs

Rego scripts are evaluated with inputs available on the input object:

allow if input.http.method == "POST"

Rego defines the following inputs:

Input name	Type	Description
http	Object	Represents the HTTP request
http.method	String	The method used in the HTTP request
http.hostname	String	The hostname in the HTTP request
http.path	String	The path in the HTTP request
http.url	String	The full URL in the HTTP request
http.headers	Object	The headers in the HTTP request
http.client_certificate	Object	The client certificate details
http.client_certificate.presented	Boolean	true if the client presented a certificate
http.client_certificate.leaf	String	The leaf certificated provided by the client (unvalidated)
http.client_certificate.intermediates	String	The remainder of the client certificate chain
http.ip	String	The user's IP address
http.session	Object	Represents the user's session
http.session.id	String	The session ID
http.is_valid_client_certificate	Boolean	true if the presented client certificate is valid

Functions

The function below is available in Rego scripts:

• get_databroker_record(record_type, record_id): Returns data from the Databroker service.

For example:

session := get_databroker_record("type.googleapis.com/session.Session", input.session.id)

Example Rego Policy

This example policy compares the given_name claim from a user's session against a list of popular first names, and only allows the 100 most popular first names.

package pomerium.policy
session = s {
  s = gset_databroker_record("type.googleapis.com/user.ServiceAccount", input.session.id)
  s != null
} else = s {
  s = get_databroker_record("type.googleapis.com/session.Session", input.session.id)
  s != null
} else = {} {
  true
}
user = u {
  u = get_databroker_record("type.googleapis.com/user.User", session.user_id)
} else = {} {
  true
}
allow = [true, {"custom-rego-authorized"}] {
  # grab all the claims from the user and session objects
  session_claims := object.get(session, "claims", {})
  user_claims := object.get(user, "claims", {})
  all_claims := object.union(session_claims, user_claims)
  # get the given_name claim. claim values are always an array of strings
  given_names := object.get(all_claims, "given_name", [])
  # query a JSON dump of the most popular baby names from 2020
  response := http.send({
    "method": "GET",
    "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aruljohn/popular-baby-names/master/2020/boy_names_2020.json",
    "force_json_decode": true,
  })
  # only include the top 100 names
  all_names := response.body.names
  popular_names := array.slice(all_names, 0, 99)
  # check that there's a given name in the popular names
  some i
  some j
  popular_names[i] == given_names[j]
} else = [false, {"custom-rego-unauthorized"}] {
  session.id != ""
} else = [false, {"user-unauthenticated"}] {
  true
}

This example pulls session data from the Databroker service using type.googleapis.com/session.Session for users and type.googleapis.com/user.ServiceAccount for service accounts.

Pomerium Enterprise

In the Enterprise Console, you can write policies in Rego with the PPL builder:

note

A policy can only support PPL or Rego. Once one is set, the other tab is disabled.

Policy overrides

Pomerium Core and Enterprise offer the following options for overriding your authorization policy:

• Any Authenticated User: Allows access to a route with this policy attached to any user who can authenticate to your identity provider
• CORS Preflight: Allows unauthenticated HTTP OPTIONS requests as per the CORS spec
• Public Access: Allows complete, unrestricted access to an associated route (use this setting with caution)

robots.txt behavior

By default, Pomerium serves a robots.txt response directly, instructing search engines not to crawl the route domain:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

For routes with policies that allow public, unauthenticated access, Pomerium will not serve robots.txt directly. Instead, Pomerium will proxy requests for /robots.txt to the upstream service.

Manage devices

Pomerium Enterprise

Device identity is an Enterprise feature. Check out our Enterprise page to learn more.

The Manage Devices feature in the Enterprise Console allows you to enroll and manage user devices for policy-based authorization.

The Devices List displays enrolled devices for each user and the approval status. Administrators can inspect, approve, or delete registered devices from this table.