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Authorization Policy

An authorization policy defines what resources a user or group can access within an organization. When applying an authorization policy, factors like access management to on-premises or cloud services, authentication flows, and device identity introduce complexity that only scales with organization size.

Pomerium meets you where you are by allowing you to configure granular policies that support or extend your existing policies on a per-route, per-request basis.

Pomerium authorization policy​

You can apply policies in Pomerium to Namespaces or Routes.

Namespaces​

Pomerium Enterprise

Namespace support is available only for Enterprise customers.

Administrators can create a namespace, add users, groups, and routes to it, and configure a policy that applies to that specific namespace.

Routes​

You can build TLS-encrypted routes to upstream applications and configure policy that restricts access based on the policy criteria.

Pomerium Enterprise and Core customers can configure and apply policies to routes.

Continuous verification​

Pomerium continuously evaluates policy on every request.

Policy applied to any route or namespace will enforce authorization checks throughout a session, ensuring that only the intended user with the right context can access a protected resource.

Apply authorization policy​

Pomerium offers three methods to configure and apply policies:

Pomerium Policy Language (PPL)​

Pomerium Policy Language (PPL) is a declarative, YAML-based access control policy language you can use to configure authorization policies.

PPL is intuitive by design and defines policy with one or more rules composed of actions, logical operators, and criteria. Each criterion has a name and corresponding data.

In Pomerium Core, you can build a policy with PPL and apply it to a route in your configuration file:

pomerium-config.yaml
policy:
  - allow:
      or:
        - email:
            is: user@example.com

In this example, only a user with the email user@example.com can access the target application.

Enterprise Console GUI​

Pomerium Enterprise

The Enterprise Console provides a policy builder GUI so you can build policies and reapply them to multiple routes and namespaces. See our Enterprise page to learn more.

Use the BUILDER tab to build your policy:

Build policy with Console GUI

In this example, a user will have access if their email address ends in example.com and their device ID matches the ID in the Value field.

Reapply policies​

Reapply policies as necessary to any route or namespace:

Reapply policies to multiple routes or namespaces

Policy overrides​

Pomerium Core and Enterprise offer the following options for overriding your authorization policy:

  • Any Authenticated User: Allows access to a route with this policy attached to any user who can authenticate to your identity provider
  • CORS Preflight: Allows unauthenticated HTTP OPTIONS requests as per the CORS spec
  • Public Access: Allows complete, unrestricted access to an associated route (use this setting with caution)
robots.txt behavior

By default, Pomerium serves a robots.txt response directly, instructing search engines not to crawl the route domain:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

For routes with policies that allow public, unauthenticated access, Pomerium will not serve robots.txt directly. Instead, Pomerium will proxy requests for /robots.txt to the upstream service.

Manage devices​

Pomerium Enterprise

Device identity is an Enterprise feature. Check out our Enterprise page to learn more.

The Manage Devices feature in the Enterprise Console allows you to enroll and manage user devices for policy-based authorization.

Enroll devices

The Devices List displays enrolled devices for each user and the approval status. Administrators can inspect, approve, or delete registered devices from this table.

List of user devices