Top 10 Open Source RBAC Tools

Based on their categories, features, and market presence I listed the top 10 open source RBAC tools that can help organizations restrict system access by granting grant permissions and privileges to users. Follow the links to see vendor capabilities:

Open source RBAC tools based on GitHub stars

Tool selection & sorting:

• Number of reviews: 300+ GitHub stars.
• Update release: At least one update was released last week.
• Sorting: Vendors are sorted based on GitHubStar numbers in descending order.

Read more: RBAC use cases, RBAC examples, open source network security software.

Casdoor

Casdoor is an Identity Access Management (IAM) platform with a web interface that supports OAuth 2.0, Google Workspace, Active Directory, and Kerberos. These IAM capabilities can help users with network security use cases.

Casdoor supports several free services, including identity verification, role-based access control, user administration, and resource upload. Casdoor implements authentication through communication with vendors and users.

Figure 1: Illustration of authentication through communication

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Source: Casdoor¹

With Casdoor roles and permissions can be paired to define customizable permissions for built-in objects (such as apps) or other access behaviors. Administrators can create groups and virtual groups based on the company’s authority structure, and each group can define permissions individually. 

Zitadel

Zitadel is an open-source identity infrastructure platform with RBAC integrations available. It combines multi-tenancy (e.g. B2B customer customer portal management), secure login, and self-service capabilities. It supports several protocols, including OpenID Connect, OAuth2.x, and SAML 2.

Video 1: Zitadel administrator console

Source: Zitadel²

Zitadel allows administrators to integrate the RBAC package and assign authorization roles from the ZITADEL Console, and permissions through the APIs.

For example, administrators may use the term “roles” to refer to application-specific positions (e.g., admin, accountant, employee, human resources, etc.), and ZITADEL-specific manager roles, such as “ORG_OWNER” and “IAM_OWNER”.

In the below example, the HR manager David Wallace’s credentials can be seen.

Figure 2: Searching management grants in Zitadel

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Source: Zitadel³

Cerbos

Cerbos is an authentication layer that allows users to design access control rules for their application resources. With Cerbos, users can:

• Collaborate with teammates to create and share policies in fully interactive private environments.
• Deliver network security policy updates to your entire packet data protocol (PDP) fleet.
• Create custom policy bundles for client-side or in-browser authorization.

Figure 3: How Cerbos integrates with your application

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Source: Cerbos⁴

Permit – Opal

OPAL is an administrative layer for policy engines such as open policy agents (OPA) that detects policy and data changes in real-time and sends live updates to administrators, allowing them to customize role-based permissions. 

With OPAL administrators can update each user’s role-based attributes. These attributes are subsequently transferred to the backend and placed in the database with the user’s information. Administrators can execute “permit.check()” function to check users’ access levels (see Video 2).

Video 2: User permission checks in the UI with Opal

Source: Permit.io⁵

Fairwinds – RBAC Manager

RBAC Manager is created to ease Kubernetes authorization. RBAC Manager allows users to customize role bindings or service account settings instead of manually maintaining configurations.

RBAC Manager has three primary goals:

1. Offering an open-ended approach to RBAC that is more accessible and flexible.
2. Minimizing the amount of settings necessary for effective authentication.
3. Automating execution of RBAC configuration modifications.

To illustrate how RBAC Manager works, consider a basic example. In this example, we’ll have a single user, Joe, who requires “edit” access to the “web” namespace with RBAC. This involves creating role bindings that allow edit access to the web namespace.

Figure 4: Role binding with Fairwinds – RBAC Manager

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Source: Fairwinds⁶

CyberArk – KubiScan

KubiScan is a tool for screening the Kubernetes cluster for risky permissions in the role-based access control (RBAC) authorization plan. This can be especially useful in large setups with several permissions that might be difficult to track.

KubiScan can:

• Detect risky roles\cluster roles.
• Detect risky role bindings\cluster role bindings.
• Detect risky subjects (e.g. users, groups, and service accounts).
• Detect risky pods\containers.
• List subjects with specific kinds (‘user’, ‘group’, or ‘service account’).
• List rules of role binding or cluster role binding.

Video 3: An example of KubiScan usage to detect risky permissions

Source: Cyberark⁷

OpenFGA

OpenFGA is an open-source fine-grained authorization system built on Google’s Zanzibar (Google’s global authorization system).

With OpenFGA administrators can:

• Write an authorization model
• Write relationship tuples
• Perform authorization checks
• Add authentication to their OpenFGA server

For example,  to check if user “user:anne” of type user has a “reader” relationship with object “document:2021-budget” administrators can write tuples to check APIs.

Thus, the query in the figure will always return { “allowed”: true }if the user sets “document:2021-budget#reader” has the “reader” relation with “document:2021-budget”

Figure 5: Querying with contextual tuples

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Source: OpenFGA⁸

Casbin Net

Casbin is an authorization library that may be used in situations where companies expect to see a specified user or subject to have access to a given object or entity.

Casbin can handle several intricate permission circumstances including roles (RBAC), attributes (ABAC). The most fundamental and simple model in Casbin is the access control list (ACL) in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Creating a role-based access control list (ACL) with Casbin

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Source: Casbin⁹

Which means:

• alice can read data1
• bob can write data2

Alcide

Alcide is an RBAC tool for Kubernetes that enables DevOps teams to build security barriers into their pipelines to defend their Kubernetes.

Alcide’s RBAC authorization leverages the “rbac.authorization.k8s.io” API group to make authorization choices, allowing users to set rules dynamically via the Kubernetes API.

With Alcide users can use Role or ClusterRole to:

• Define rights on namespace ( collection of names for identifying objects) resources and grant them inside a particular namespace(s).
• Define permissions on namespaced objects.
• Define permissions for cluster-scoped resources.

Table 2: Roles and cluster roles used attached to user or groups 

Palo Alto Networks – Police

Palo Alto Network’s RBAC Police can get the RBAC permissions of Kubernetes identities, including service accounts, pods, nodes, users, and groups. The policy library contains 20+ rules that detect identities with dangerous permissions, based on a distinct attack pattern. With Police tools users can:

• Inspect the permissions of specific identities
• Configure violation types
• Create custom policies
• Scope a namespace

Figure 7: A custom policy example with the Police Tool

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Source: Palo Alto Networks¹⁰

With the Palo Alto Network Police, administrators can define specific RBAC policies. In the example:

• The “describe” rule specifies the description and severity of the policy.
• The “targets” set specifies whose identities the policy assesses and generates violations for.
• The “evaluateRoles” function gets the roles of a serviceAccounts, node, user, or group and assesses if they violate policy.

Read more: RBAC use cases, RBAC examples.

Why should your organization use RBAC tools?

Network security statistics show that 6+ million data records were exposed globally due to data breaches in the first quarter of 2023. Delivering role-based conventional logic is an effective method for governing, unauthorized user access to vital company resources, however, manually dealing with hundreds of conditional statements might require significant effort.

Security teams can enhance their protection strategies by integrating centralized open-source Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) tools with Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems. This ensures that only authorized users can access sensitive resources, improving access governance.

Additionally, by implementing microsegmentation, security policies can be applied across isolated network zones, further restricting access and minimizing the attack surface. This layered approach strengthens security by combining granular user permissions with tightly controlled network boundaries.

Benefits of open source RBAC tools

Open source RBAC tools allow users to:

• Interact with fellow developers to report and track bugs and feature requests with transparency.
• Follow the latest development version and view how development is proceeding.
• Fix bugs and implement features if you know how to code.
• Avoid initial price payments, subscription fees, and vendor lock-in.

How to select open source RBAC tools

Here are a few recommendations to consider while selecting an open source RBAC tool:

• Check the tool’s popularity: The number of GitHub contributors and community members responding to user inquiries reflects the popularity rate of open source technologies. The larger the community, the more support your organization can get.

• Check the tool’s features: Most open source RBAC tools provide role customization, permissions registration, and login methods. However, if your organization expects to use the RBAC tool for diverse purposes you should look for a more complete product. For example, an organization looking for automated access management might consider a solution with identity access management (IAM) features.

• Compare closed-source solutions: Open source solutions usually include limited or add-on features. Implementing a more tailored solution that offers a higher level of features (e.g., cloud segmentation) can be more efficient for your organization. Here is a list of closed-source micro segmentation tools with RBAC features.

For guidance on choosing the right tool or service, check out our data-driven sources: network security policy management (NSPM) tools and incident response tools.

Further reading

• Role-based access control (RBAC)  
• Network Segmentation: 6 Benefits & 8 Best Practices
• 80+ Network Security Statistics
• Network Security Policy Management Solutions (NSPM)
• Top 10 SDP Software Based on 4,000+ Reviews
• Top 10 Network Security Audit Tools Based on 4,000 Reviews

AIMultiple can assist your organization in finding the right vendor. 

Reference Links

1.

Casdoor · An open-source UI-first Identity and Access Management (IAM) / Single-Sign-On (SSO) platform with web UI supporting OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, CAS, LDAP, SCIM, WebAuthn, TOTP, MFA, RADIUS, Google Workspace, Active Directory and Kerberos | Casdoor ·

2.

GitHub - zitadel/zitadel: ZITADEL - Identity infrastructure, simplified for you.

3.

Retrieve User Roles in ZITADEL | ZITADEL Docs

4.

GitHub - cerbos/cerbos: Cerbos is the open core, language-agnostic, scalable authorization solution that makes user permissions and authorization simple to implement and manage by writing context-aware access control policies for your application resource

5.

Load Custom Data | Permit.io Documentation

6.

Fairwinds · GitHub

7.

kubiscan_demo2

8.

Open FGA API Explorer | OpenFGA

9.

Casbin · GitHub

10.

GitHub - PaloAltoNetworks/rbac-police: Evaluate the RBAC permissions of Kubernetes identities through policies written in Rego

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