Cerbos Synapse

Synapse is a modular, enrichment proxy that complements the open source Cerbos PDP. It can either be dropped in place of the existing PDPs or deployed as a standalone gateway in front of the existing fleet. It exposes the same Cerbos API (both http and gRPC) on a single port and, in its default configuration, behaves exactly the same way as a PDP. Its power lies in the ability to configure request enrichment pipelines, HTTP handlers for integrating with third-party authorization APIs and native Envoy external authorization support.

How Synapse works

Synapse has several extension points that support multiple extension types:

  • Native components built, distributed, and supported by Cerbos engineers

  • Custom scripts written using Starlark, a lightweight Python dialect

  • Custom components built using any language that compiles to web assembly (WASM)

  • Declarative mapping using Common Expression Language (CEL), the same language used to author conditions in Cerbos policies (select extension points only)

Learn more