README.md

cedar-go

This repository contains source code of the Go implementation of the Cedar policy language.

Cedar is a language for writing and enforcing authorization policies in your applications. Using Cedar, you can write policies that specify your applications' fine-grained permissions. Your applications then authorize access requests by calling Cedar's authorization engine. Because Cedar policies are separate from application code, they can be independently authored, updated, analyzed, and audited. You can use Cedar's validator to check that Cedar policies are consistent with a declared schema which defines your application's authorization model.

Cedar is:

Expressive

Cedar is a simple yet expressive language that is purpose-built to support authorization use cases for common authorization models such as RBAC and ABAC.

Performant

Cedar is fast and scalable. The policy structure is designed to be indexed for quick retrieval and to support fast and scalable real-time evaluation, with bounded latency.

Analyzable

Cedar is designed for analysis using Automated Reasoning. This enables analyzer tools capable of optimizing your policies and proving that your security model is what you believe it is.

Using Cedar

Cedar can be used in your application by importing the github.com/cedar-policy/cedar-go package.

Comparison to the Rust implementation

The Go implementation includes:

• the core authorizer
• JSON marshalling and unmarshalling
• all core and extended types (including RFC 80's datetime and duration)
• integration test suite

The Go implementation does not yet include:

• CLI applications
• schema support and the validator
• the formatter
• partial evaluation
• support for policy templates

Quick Start

Here's a simple example of using Cedar in Go:

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"log"

	cedar "github.com/cedar-policy/cedar-go"
)

const policyCedar = `permit (
	principal == User::"alice",
	action == Action::"view",
	resource in Album::"jane_vacation"
  );
`

const entitiesJSON = `[
  {
    "uid": { "type": "User", "id": "alice" },
    "attrs": { "age": 18 },
    "parents": []
  },
  {
    "uid": { "type": "Photo", "id": "VacationPhoto94.jpg" },
    "attrs": {},
    "parents": [{ "type": "Album", "id": "jane_vacation" }]
  }
]`

func main() {
	var policy cedar.Policy
	if err := policy.UnmarshalCedar([]byte(policyCedar)); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}

	ps := cedar.NewPolicySet()
	ps.Add("policy0", &policy)

	var entities cedar.EntityMap
	if err := json.Unmarshal([]byte(entitiesJSON), &entities); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	
	req := cedar.Request{
		Principal: cedar.NewEntityUID("User", "alice"),
		Action:    cedar.NewEntityUID("Action", "view"),
		Resource:  cedar.NewEntityUID("Photo", "VacationPhoto94.jpg"),
		Context:   cedar.NewRecord(cedar.RecordMap{
			"demoRequest": cedar.True,
        }),
	}

	ok, _ := ps.IsAuthorized(entities, req)
	fmt.Println(ok)
}

CLI output:

allow

This request is allowed because VacationPhoto94.jpg belongs to Album::"jane_vacation", and alice can view photos in Album::"jane_vacation".

If you'd like to see more details on what can be expressed as Cedar policies, see the documentation.

Packages

The cedar-go module houses four public packages:

• cedar - The main package for interacting with the module, including parsing policies and entities and authorizing requests.
• ast - Programmatic construction of Cedar ASTs
• types - Basic types common to multiple packages. For convenience, most of these are also projected through the cedar package.
• x/exp/batch - An experimental batch authorization API supporting high-performance variable substitution via partial evaluation.

Documentation

General documentation for Cedar is available at docs.cedarpolicy.com, with source code in the cedar-policy/cedar-docs repository.

Generated documentation for the latest version of the Go implementation can be accessed here.

If you're looking to integrate Cedar into a production system, please be sure the read the security best practices

Backward Compatibility Considerations

• x/exp - code in this directory is not subject to the semantic versioning constraints of the rest of the module and breaking changes may be made at any time.
• Variadics may be added to functions that do not have them to expand the arguments of a function or method.
• Concrete types may be replaced with compatible interfaces to expand the variety of arguments a function or method can take.

Change log

New features in 1.0.0

• AST builder methods for Cedar datetime and duration literals and their extension methods have been added
• AST builder methods for adding extension function calls with uninterpreted strings
• Small improvement in evaluation runtime performance for large, shallow entity graphs.

Upgrading from 0.4.x to 1.0.0

• The Parents field on types.Entity has been changed to an immutable set type with an interface similar to types.Set
• The UnsafeDecimal() constructor for the types.Decimal type has been removed and replaced with the following safe constructors, which return error on overflow:
  • NewDecimal(int64 i, int exponent) (Decimal, error)
  • NewDecimalFromInt[T constraints.Signed](i T) (Decimal, error)
  • NewDecimalFromFloat[T constraints.Float](f T) (Decimal, error)
• The Value field on types.Decimal has been made private. Instances of Decimal can be compared with one another via the new Compare method.
• types.DecimalPrecision has been made private
• The following error types have been made private: types.ErrDateitme, types.ErrDecimal, types.ErrDuration, types.ErrIP, types.ErrNotComparable
• The following datetime and duration-related constructors have been renamed:
  • types.FromStdTime() has been renamed to types.NewDatetime()
  • types.DatetimeFromMillis() has been renamed to types.NewDatetimeFromMillis()
  • types.FromStdDuration() has been renamed to types.NewDuration()
  • types.DurationFromMillis() has been renamed to types.NewDurationFromMillis()
• types.Entities has been renamed to types.EntityMap
• Because types.Entity is now immutable, types.EntityMap now stores items by value rather than by pointer
• PolicySet.Store() has been renamed to PolicySet.Add()
• PolicySet.Delete() has been renamed to PolicySet.Remove()
• types.Set() now takes variadic arguments of type types.Value instead of a single []types.Value argument

New features in 0.4.0

• types.Set is now implemented as a hash set, turning Set.Contains() into an O(1) operation, on average. This mitigates a worst case quadratic runtime for the evaluation of the containsAny() operator.
• For convenience, public types, constructors, and constants from the types package are now exported via the cedar package as well.

Upgrading from 0.3.x to 0.4.x

• types.Set is now an immutable type which must be constructed via types.NewSet()
  • To iterate the values, use Set.Iterate(), which takes an iterator callback.
  • Duplicates are now removed from Sets, so they won't be rendered when calling Set.MarshalCedar() or Set.MarshalJSON.
  • All implementations of types.Value are now safe to copy shallowly, so Set.DeepClone() has been removed.
• types.Record is now an immutable type which must be constructed via types.NewRecord()
  • To iterate the keys and values, use Record.Iterate(), which takes an iterator callback.
  • All implementations of types.Value are now safe to copy shallowly, so Record.DeepClone() has been removed.

New features in 0.3.2

• An implementation of the datetime and duration extension types specified in RFC 80.
  • Note: While these types have been accepted into the language, they have not yet been formally analyzed in the specification.

New features in 0.3.1

• General performance improvements to the evaluator
• An experimental batch evaluator has been added to x/exp/batch
• Reserved keywords are now rejected in all appropriate places when parsing Cedar text
• A parsing ambiguity between variables, entity UIDs, and extension functions has been resolved

Upgrading from 0.2.x to 0.3.x

• The JSON marshaling of the Position struct now uses canonical lower-case keys for its fields

New features in 0.2.0

• A programmatic AST is now available in the ast package.
• Policy sets can be marshaled and unmarshaled from JSON.
• Policies can also be marshaled to Cedar text.

Upgrading from 0.1.x to 0.2.x

• The Cedar value types have moved from the cedar package to the types package.
• The PolicyIDs are now strings, previously they were numeric.
• Errors and reasons use the new PolicyID form.
• Combining multiple parsed Cedar files now involves coming up with IDs for each statement in those files. It's best to create an empty NewPolicySet then parse individual files using NewPolicyListFromBytes and subsequently use PolicySet.Store to add each of the policy statements.
• The Cedar Entity and Entities types have moved from the cedar package to the types package.
• Stronger typing is being used in many places.
• The Value method Cedar() string was changed to MarshalCedar() []byte

Security

See CONTRIBUTING for more information.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community. Please either file an issue, or see CONTRIBUTING

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.