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POST
/
v1
/
tenants
/
{tenant_id}
/
permissions
/
check
go
cr, err := client.Permission.Check(context.Background(), &v1.PermissionCheckRequest {
    TenantId: "t1",
    Metadata: &v1.PermissionCheckRequestMetadata {
        SnapToken: "",
        SchemaVersion: "",
        Depth: 20,
    },
    Entity: &v1.Entity {
        Type: "repository",
        Id: "1",
    },
    Permission: "edit",
    Subject: &v1.Subject {
        Type: "user",
        Id: "1",
    },
})
if cr.Can == v1.PermissionCheckResponse_Result_RESULT_ALLOWED {
    // RESULT_ALLOWED
} else {
    // RESULT_DENIED
}
{
  "can": "CHECK_RESULT_UNSPECIFIED",
  "metadata": {
    "check_count": 123
  }
}
In Permify, you can perform two different types access checks,
  • resource based authorization checks, structured in the following form: Can user U perform action Y in resource Z ?
  • subject based authorization checks, structured in the following form: Which resources can user U edit ?
In this section we’ll look at the resource based check request of Permify. You can find subject based access checks in Entity (Data) Filtering section.

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Content

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Example Check requests

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Resource Based Check (Relationships)

POST /v1/permissions/check
  • Go
  • Node
  • Python
  • cURL
cr, err: = client.Permission.Check(context.Background(), &v1.PermissionCheckRequest {
    TenantId: "t1",
    Metadata: &v1.PermissionCheckRequestMetadata {
        SnapToken: "",
        SchemaVersion: "",
        Depth: 20,
    },
    Entity: &v1.Entity {
        Type: "repository",
        Id: "1",
    },
    Permission: "edit",
    Subject: &v1.Subject {
        Type: "user",
        Id: "1",
    },

    if (cr.can === PermissionCheckResponse_Result.RESULT_ALLOWED) {
        // RESULT_ALLOWED
    } else {
        // RESULT_DENIED
    }
})

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Attribute Based (ABAC) Check With Context Data

client.permission.check({
    tenantId: "t1",
    metadata: {
        snapToken: "",
        schemaVersion: "",
        depth: 20,
    },
    entity: {
        type: "organization",
        id: "1",
    },
    permission: "hr_manager",
    subject: {
        type: "user",
        id: "1",
    },
    context: {
        data: {
            ip_address: "192.158.1.38",
        },
    },
}).then((response) => {
    if (response.can === PermissionCheckResponse_Result.RESULT_ALLOWED) {
        console.log("RESULT_ALLOWED");
    } else {
        console.log("RESULT_DENIED");
    }
});

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How Access Decisions Evaluated?

Access decisions are evaluated by stored relational tuples and your authorization model, Permify Schema. In high level, access of an subject related with the relationships or attributes created between the subject and the resource. You can define this data in Permify Schema then create and store them as relational tuples and attributes, which is basically forms your authorization data. Permify Engine to compute access decision in 2 steps,
  1. Looking up authorization model for finding the given action’s ( edit, push, delete etc.) relations.
  2. Walk over a graph of each relation to find whether given subject ( user or user set ) is related with the action.
Let’s turn back to above authorization question ( “Can the user 3 edit document 12 ?” ) to better understand how decision evaluation works. When Permify Engine receives this question it directly looks up to authorization model to find document ‍edit action. Let’s say we have a model as follows 
entity user {}
        
entity organization {

    // organizational roles
    relation admin @user
    relation member @user
}

entity document {

    // represents documents parent organization
    relation parent @organization
    
    // represents owner of this document
    relation owner  @user
    
    // permissions
    action edit   = parent.admin or owner
    action delete = owner
}
Which has a directed graph as follows: relational-tuples As we can see above: only users with an admin role in an organization, which document:12 belongs, and owners of the document:12 can edit. Permify runs two concurrent queries for parent.admin and owner: Q1: Get the owners of the document:12. Q2: Get admins of the organization where document:12 belongs to. Since edit action consist or between owner and parent.admin, if Permify Engine found user:3 in results of one of these queries then it terminates the other ongoing queries and returns authorized true to the client. Rather than or, if we had an and relation then Permify Engine waits the results of these queries to returning a decision.

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Latency & Performance

With the right architecture we expect 7-12 ms latency. Depending on your load, cache usage and architecture you can get up to 30ms. Permify implements several cache mechanisms in order to achieve low latency in scaled distributed systems. See more on the section Cache Mechanisims

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Parameters & Properties

Path Parameters

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tenant_id
string
required

Identifier of the tenant, if you are not using multi-tenancy (have only one tenant) use pre-inserted tenant <code>t1</code> for this field. Required, and must match the pattern \“[a-zA-Z0-9-,]+\“, max 64 bytes.

Body

application/json

PermissionCheckRequest is the request message for the Check method in the Permission service.

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metadata
object

PermissionCheckRequestMetadata metadata for the PermissionCheckRequest.

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entity
object

Entity represents an entity with a type and an identifier.

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permission
string

The action the user wants to perform on the resource

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subject
object

Subject represents an entity subject with a type, an identifier, and a relation.

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context
object

Context encapsulates the information related to a single operation, including the tuples involved and the associated attributes.

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arguments
object[]

Additional arguments associated with this request.

Response

A successful response.

PermissionCheckResponse is the response message for the Check method in the Permission service.

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can
enum<string>
default:CHECK_RESULT_UNSPECIFIED

Enumerates results of a check operation.

  • CHECK_RESULT_UNSPECIFIED: Not specified check result. This is the default value.
  • CHECK_RESULT_ALLOWED: Represents a successful check (the check allowed the operation).
  • CHECK_RESULT_DENIED: Represents a failed check (the check denied the operation).
Available options:
CHECK_RESULT_UNSPECIFIED,
CHECK_RESULT_ALLOWED,
CHECK_RESULT_DENIED
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metadata
object

PermissionCheckResponseMetadata metadata for the PermissionCheckResponse.

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