Authorization flow

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway evaluates Cedar policies against incoming requests. This section explains how authorization information flows from the request to policy evaluation.

Request processing

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway processes two key pieces of information from each request:

Cedar authorization request

The Gateway extracts information from both sources and constructs a Cedar authorization request.

Complete Authorization Request:

{
  "principal": "AgentCore::OAuthUser::\"12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012\"",
  "action": "AgentCore::Action::\"RefundTool___process_refund\"",
  "resource": "AgentCore::Gateway::\"arn:aws:bedrock-agentcore:us-west-2:123456789012:gateway/refund-gateway\"",
  "context": {
    "input": {
      "orderId": "12345",
      "amount": 450,
      "reason": "Defective product"
    }
  }
}

Components:

Entity Store - The JWT claims are stored as tags on the OAuthUser entity:

{
  "uid": {
    "type": "AgentCore::OAuthUser",
    "id": "12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012"
  },
  "attrs": {
    "id": "12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012"
  },
  "tags": {
    "username": "refund-agent",
    "iss": "https://cognito-idp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/us-east-1_Vg2efaoGO",
    "scope": "aws.cognito.signin.user.admin refund:write",
    "role": "admin",
    "department": "finance"
  }
}

Session context for temporal policies

When a x-amzn-bedrock-agentcore-policy-session-id header is present, the Gateway includes the session context in the authorization request passed to the policy engine. The session context provides the accumulated action history for the current session. Temporal policy rules evaluate constraints over time using this history.

{
  "principal": "AgentCore::OAuthUser::\"12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012\"",
  "action": "AgentCore::Action::\"PaymentTool___transfer_funds\"",
  "resource": "AgentCore::Gateway::\"arn:aws:bedrock-agentcore:us-west-2:123456789012:gateway/my-gateway\"",
  "context": {
    "input": {
      "amount": 500,
      "recipient": "account-789"
    }
  },
  "sessionId": "12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012"
}

The sessionId field links the current request to its session history. The policy engine resolves the session state and evaluates all applicable temporal rules against the accumulated action chain.

For details on supplying the session ID, the session lifecycle, and how identity propagates across multi-hop calls, see Policy sessions and identity propagation.

Policy evaluation

Cedar evaluates:

Result: ALLOW - All checks pass, the refund is authorized.