Passwordless authentication company Descope Inc. today announced the availability of Fine-Grained Authorization, a new service designed to help customers easily create granular authorization models for their applications.

The new service works with Descope’s software development kits and application programming interfaces to allow organizations to define and assign permissions based on relationships between entities, enabling them to set up authorization systems that can match the nuances of their business.

Fine-Grained Authorization has been designed to address the increasingly complex demands of modern business access control. Descope argues that traditional role-based access control or RBAC systems are insufficient for today’s dynamic business environments, where stakeholders such as customers, partners and contractors require varied access to resources across multiple applications.

By contrast, Descope FGA offers a more sophisticated, relationship-based approach that allows organizations to tailor authorization more precisely and flexibly based on the specific relationships and interactions between different entities. The solution overcomes the limitations of RBAC by providing a more granular, scalable and adaptable authorization framework that caters to the evolving needs of businesses.

Key features of the new service include the ability to add Relationship-Based Access Control — an authorization approach where permissions can be defined based on the relationship between entities — to their applications. ReBAC is claimed to offer benefits including saving time, empowering end users to create an ownership relationship and support for assigning bulk and dynamic permissions.

With Descopes software development kits and APIs, customers can define a schema listing out the types of entities and the possible relationships within an app’s framework. The schema can be stored and efficiently queried, managed and updated as relationships evolve.

The service also allows users to build relationships between specific entities based on their schema and add checks within their apps to refer to the defined relationships before making authorization decisions.

Image: Descope