claimdriven

Claimdriven is an approach in information technology in which system behavior is guided by claims—assertions about a subject, resource, or context—supplied by trusted sources. A claim can describe a user’s identity, privileges, group memberships, or contextual attributes such as time or location. The claim set feeds decision points, allowing access control, data exposure, and workflow routing to be determined at runtime rather than hard-coded rules.

The approach draws on claim-based identity and attribute-based access control (ABAC). It aligns with policy-based security models where a policy engine evaluates claims against defined rules to render permit or deny decisions. Standards such as SAML, OpenID Connect, and XACML have popularized claims as carriers of identity and attributes, supporting modern cloud and microservice architectures.

Key components include an identity or attribute provider that issues claims, trust mechanisms for federation, a policy engine that ingests claims and policies, and a decision point that enforces outcomes across services.

Applications include enterprise IT, API security, data-sharing platforms, and privacy-preserving systems. Benefits include fine-grained, interoperable authorization, policy reuse across domains, and adaptability to changing context without code changes.

Challenges involve ensuring trust and freshness of claims, mitigating spoofing, data minimization, and governance of claim schemas and trust boundaries. When well implemented, claim-driven systems enable scalable, context-aware access control and flexible policy enforcement.