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Open Authorization API

Using Veza APIs to add custom data and identity providers to the Veza Entity Catalog

The Open Authorization API (OAA) is used to publish information about identities, authorization, and resources to the Veza entity catalog, making custom-built or otherwise-unsupported applications available for search, workflows, and monitoring. A typical motivation for using OAA is the need to integrate with enterprise applications that don't have an official Veza integration, such as a custom identity broker or source control management system.

Each built-in Veza integration has a fixed schema unique to the provider. Integrations created with OAA can use either the Custom Identity Provider or Custom Application schema, both of which are flexible enough to model a wide range of data and identity sources.

Several community connectors built on OAA are already available for immediate use, enabling easy connection to SaaS providers such as GitHub, SalesForce, and others. You can also develop a custom connector using the Veza-provided Python SDK oaaclient or your language of choice.

To integrate a custom application using OAA, you will typically rely on an API (or another method) to list identities and resources within the host system, and retrieve entity and authorization metadata such as permissions, roles, and activity status. You must then structure this information according to one of the supported OAA templates. Once you have assembled the JSON payload, you can publish it using REST API calls or the oaaclient CLI.

Use Cases

Customers have utilized the Open Authorization API to accommodate many different scenarios. A few use cases include:

  • Using the GitHub connector to ensure that repositories holding critical source code are correctly configured.

  • Collecting infrastructure-as-a-code (IaC) configurations to audit which users can log in to important hosts.

  • Auditing the permissions granted by an internal developer portal.

First Steps

Getting Started introduces important OAA workflows, the custom application template, and common API operations. When planning your connector, you may also want to review the Core Concepts for more information about naming considerations, mapping custom applications to the OAA schema, and other topics.

Veza provides a Python SDK and working example connectors, which you can download using GitHub or pip install oaaclient. Examples and documentation are included with the source code.

Alternatively, you can parse a data source, compile the JSON payload, and publish it using your language of choice. For detailed documentation on the OAA schema and API operations, see:

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