Cerbos v0.50.0

Highlights

This release contains several changes that might affect how the Cerbos PDP behaves in your environment. We recommend that you test the new version in a non-production environment before upgrading. Notable changes are:

• There are stricter rules around variable names and the (undocumented) ability to treat variable containers as maps is no longer supported.
• Query plans on scoped resources might change slightly because the engine now considers the rules from parent scopes as well. This makes the plan API behave the same way as the check API when dealing with scopes.

This release also includes performance improvements that makes the engine significantly faster and reduces the compute resources required for decisions.

Changelog

Breaking changes

• Prevent index lookup of constants, globals, and variables

The top-level identifiers constants/C, globals/G, or variables/V do not support index lookup in CEL expressions, so accessing these values must be done using the . operator (V.foo instead of V["foo"]). Consequently, these values must be defined with names that are valid CEL identifiers (matching [_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9]* and excluding the keywords true, false, null, and in). Policy compilation will now fail on expressions using index lookups to access constants, globals, or variables, and definitions with invalid names.

Features

• Ability to configure a default scope for requests

It is now possible to configure the PDP with a default scope value. If engine.DefaultScope is set, any CheckResources or PlanResources requests without an explicit scope will default to the configured value.

Enhancements

• Add InspectPolicies support to rule table based stores
• Add dot as an alias to empty scope

It is now possible to set the scope '.' instead of '' in the check and plan resources requests for the same effect. This is particularly useful when engine.defaultScope is configured in Cerbos configuration.

• Ruletable performance optimizations

These optimizations significantly reduce the time and memory spent on decisions across the board.

Bug fixes

• Isolate role policy restrictions in query planner

Fixes a regression introduced as a result of fixing how role policy effects are intersected for principals with multiple roles

• Union conditions across scope boundaries in query planner