Authorizer Filters AI File Access Through App Login Rules

Teams that connect AI assistants to internal files can use Authorizer to put access checks in the same path as sign-in, Help Net Security reports.

Authorizer is an open-source server for authentication and authorization in web and mobile apps.

Instead of sending account data to a hosted identity service, teams run the Go-based server on their own infrastructure and keep user records in a database they choose.

The product's AI relevance comes from where it places permissions.

A vector search can retrieve text that is close to a user's question without deciding whether that user is allowed to see each document.

Authorizer gives the search layer a list of permitted documents first, so entries outside that access list are removed before the remaining material is scored.

The login layer still covers standard application needs.

The server supports email and password, magic links, passkeys, one-time codes for multifactor authentication, and social login through 10 providers.

It also supports SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect for corporate single sign-on systems such as Okta, and it works with at least 13 databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and DynamoDB.

For fine-grained rules, Authorizer embeds OpenFGA, the open-source system modeled on Google's Zanzibar authorization design.

OpenFGA stores permissions as relationships, such as whether a particular user may view a particular file.

The same package includes a Model Context Protocol server for tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.

That interface exposes three read-only functions — profile, checkpermissions and listpermissions — and the source description limits it to local stdio rather than a network endpoint.

An agent acting for a user receives only the overlap between its own permissions and that user's permissions.