Lightning fast, global scale authorization service without the overhead of a yet another DSL1.

Ruek is an authorization service for securing your applications and services using zero trust2 fine-grained authorization (FGA).

We designed Ruek to be as powerful and scalable as Zanzibar — Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System yet simple enough to start using without the overhead of having to learn a new DSL to define authorization models or policies.

There are other open-source (and commercial) authorization services, some are inspired by Google Zanzibar while others tend to offer policy-as-code solutions. But almost all of these solutions require learning a new DSL to create authorization models or define policies, which adds unnecessary complexities.

Using an authorization service shouldn't come with a requirement to be an expert in building and maintaining authorization models or policies. It should be as easy as using an API.

Ruek lean on well known API design principals to provide an authorization service that's easy to integrate, quick to master and flexible enough to handle complex requirements.

• ABAC, RBAC & ReBAC
• Schema-less fine-grained authorization (FGA)
• Zero-trust, least privilege architecture (ZTA)
• Predictable constant time authorization checks (O(1))3
• Strongly consistent with no cache
• Cloud native at global scale4
• Multi-tenancy support, if you need it
• Not just authorization checks, list users, entities a user can access and users with access to an entity
• First class treatment for listing endpoints with pagination and limits to handle large datasets
• Built using the fastest gRPC server implementation5

You can find a bit more detailed documentation in docs/.

docker network create ruek-net

docker run --net=ruek-net --name=pg -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres -d postgres:16-alpine

echo "create user ruek with password 'ruek'; create database ruek owner ruek;" | docker run --rm -i --network=ruek-net -e PGPASSWORD=postgres postgres:16-alpine psql --host=pg --username=postgres

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/uatuko/ruek/refs/heads/main/db/schema.sql | docker run --rm -i --network=ruek-net -e PGPASSWORD=ruek postgres:16-alpine psql --host=pg --username=ruek --dbname=ruek

docker run --network=ruek-net --name=ruek -e PGHOST=pg -e PGUSER=ruek -e PGPASSWORD=ruek -p 8080:8080 -d uatuko/ruek:latest

• fmt - For string formatting.
• googletest - For tests.
• benchmark - For benchmarks.
• grpcxx - For the gRPC server.
• libpqxx - For PostgreSQL connections.
• libxid - For globally unique IDs.

Footnotes

1. Domain-Specific Language ↩

2. Zero trust architecture (ZTA) ↩

3. Authorization check using ReBAC set (O(1+n+m)) and graph (O(1+v+e)) strategies are not constant time. ↩

4. Scalability depends on underlying PostgreSQL protocol compatible database scalability. ↩

5. gRPCxx is benchmarked to be the fastest in February 2024. ↩