Developer Builds Live Playground to Compare Four Authorization Engines Side by Side

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A developer created an interactive browser-based tool to test four authorization engines — Cedar, Casbin, OpenFGA (ReBAC), and OPA/Rego — against identical access-control rules and every possible request combination. The experiment revealed that ReBAC struggled with time-based conditions, since its core check function has no concept of time, causing it to allow edits at 3am while the other three engines correctly denied them. This limitation is acknowledged by OpenFGA itself, which later introduced Conditions specifically to address time-sensitive scenarios. The project also exposed a subtle testing blind spot: the test suite sampled only four times of day, missing business-hours boundary cases entirely, meaning a misconfigured time window went undetected despite all tests passing. The tool runs fully in the browser using WebAssembly bindings, with no backend, and is publicly available as an open-source repository.

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