Authentication Scopes — Proposed Guide

Authentication Scopes: Scopes describe permitted operation families, such as reading expenses or creating draft reports. They should be narrower than a…

Overview

Scopes describe permitted operation families, such as reading expenses or creating draft reports. They should be narrower than a blanket organization administrator permission.

Key concepts

Use an explicit allowlist and check both scope and record ownership. Reading a reimbursement should not imply permission to initiate or retry a payment.

Implementation considerations

Scope names below are illustrative. Future consent and token issuance must reject unknown or unauthorized scopes rather than silently granting them.

Illustrative data model

This local fixture shows a possible representation for the concepts above. It is not an endpoint response, production configuration or a claim that the described capability is implemented.

{
  "reference_only": true,
  "topic": "Authentication Scopes",
  "scope": [
    "expenses:read"
  ],
  "resource_type": "expense",
  "organization_id": "org_example_123"
}

Design review checklist

• Document which organization owns the authentication scopes representation and which actor may view or change it.
• Test the boundaries of scope, resource type, organization id using synthetic values, including missing or inconsistent references.
• Before future implementation, obtain an approved contract and review failure behavior. This documentation does not authorize production activation.

Proposed data types

Related documentation