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The party that confers a permission and the party that exercises it should be different roles in your design, with different records and different checks. A resource owner or administrator grants; a user, agent or service acts; the protected system verifies the attempted action against what was granted. Collapse these and you lose the ability to answer basic questions later: who approved this, what was it allowed to do, and could it pass the access on?
A plain example
A manager who owns a shared project folder lets a colleague, or a software agent, edit documents in it. The manager is the grantor. The colleague or agent is the recipient. The folder, and the edit action, define the scope. The file system or API that refuses or allows each edit is the enforcer. One vendor may run all three pieces, but they remain separate questions. The sources below describe these as design questions in specific products. They do not establish a universal legal rule about who may grant authority.
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The four questions every permission model must answer
1. Who is allowed to grant?
Granting is itself a privilege. Keycloak’s authorization guide frames the underlying concern as whether a resource owner can decide “who can access a particular resource and how.” Who counts as an owner or administrator is set by the organization’s own policy, not by the technology. See the Keycloak Authorization Services Guide, version 26.7.5.
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Keycloak’s model reads “X CAN DO Y ON RESOURCE Z”, where X can be users, roles, groups, claims or context. A recipient can therefore be a person, a group or, in other systems, an agent.
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3. What may the recipient do, and to which resource?
Keycloak describes scope as the bounded extent of possible access, with actions such as view, edit and delete as examples (Y in the formula), applied to a protected resource (Z). A grant without an action and a resource is too vague to enforce or audit.
4. What checks the attempted action?
Keycloak describes a policy enforcement point that requests authorization data and controls access according to the returned decision. The check happens where the resource is protected, at the time of the attempt, not when the grant was made.
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Grant and use are separate events: the Microsoft agent example
Microsoft’s interactive-agent flow in Microsoft Entra Agent ID shows the split in software. Consent comes first. Later the user is authenticated, a token is obtained, and that token is used to reach downstream APIs. Microsoft Learn documentation puts it this way: “Instead, it records that the user granted the agent permission to act on their behalf.”
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Grant rights and action rights as different mandates: a Finnish example
The Incomes Register Unit’s e-service testing instructions for data providers (Appendix 2) show the idea outside software design. They separate a “Mandate for transactions”, the right to carry out transactions, from a “Right to grant a mandate”. They also describe a “Representative’s right to grant a mandate”, and identify an authorized signatory as the party that grants organizational authorizations.
So a person may be able to act without being able to authorize others, and vice versa. This is a service-specific authorization model for that register, not a general legal rule. Do not assume another organization or jurisdiction works the same way.
Limited, auditable delegation
Oracle’s documentation on access control with proxy users describes limited delegation and administrator audit capabilities for actions performed by a proxy. The point is that delegation should be bounded and that someone other than the proxy can review what the proxy did.
Checklist for designing or comparing systems
| Question | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|
| Who may grant? | A named role or policy, distinct from the right to use the access |
| Who is the recipient? | An identifiable user, group or agent |
| Can the recipient grant onward? | An explicit yes or no, recorded with the grant |
| Which actions and resources? | Enumerated, such as view, edit or delete on a specific resource |
| Where is it enforced? | At the protected resource, using a validated token or decision at call time |
| Is it audited? | Records of who granted, and of what the recipient did |
| Can it be revoked or time-limited? | Depends on the system; confirm in that product’s documentation |
The cited sources document scoped permissions, enforcement and audit examples. They do not settle revocation or expiry for every platform, and they do not rank the systems against each other or show a shared feature set, so verify those controls for the product you use.
Quick Recap
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Common failure modes
- Treating consent as authorization at runtime. The API still has to validate the token on each call.
- Unscoped grants. “Access” without an action and a resource cannot be enforced or reviewed.
- Implicit onward delegation. If recipients can pass access along without it being stated, the grant’s reach is unknown.
- Same person grants and approves their own use. Whether that is acceptable is a matter of your governing policy, so state it explicitly.
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