Open Policy Agent (OPA) RASP

The decision point was instant. The policy engine had to say yes or no.

Open Policy Agent (OPA) RASP makes that decision inside your application, not just at the edge. OPA is an open-source framework for declarative, fine-grained policy enforcement. RASP — runtime application self-protection — means the guardrails live within the running process, seeing the real data, intercepting unsafe actions before they cause damage. Combined, they create continuous, in-process control over logic, access, and risk.

OPA works through policy-as-code. You write rules in Rego, a purpose-built language for expressing conditions and outcomes. With RASP integration, these rules run inside the app’s request path, evaluating context like user identity, request payloads, method calls, or environment state. This approach shifts security left into the codebase while also guarding right at runtime.

Deploying OPA with RASP has clear advantages:

• Immediate enforcement: No network call to a separate service.
• Context-rich decisions: Access to full in-process data structures.
• Unified governance: Same policies serve both pre-deployment checks and live runtime enforcement.
• Reduced attack surface: Blocking unsafe execution paths before they happen.

A typical setup loads OPA as a library or sidecar within your application. During execution, RASP hooks trigger policy evaluation at defined points — for example, before database writes, file access, or API calls. Policies can be updated dynamically, allowing instant rollout of new rules without redeploying core services. Logging from OPA provides traceability on every decision, aiding audits and incident response.

OPA RASP scales across services. In microservice environments, each instance enforces its own policies locally yet fetches updated rules from a centralized repository. This pattern removes latency from decision-making and keeps enforcement resilient even if the central policy server is down.

Security teams gain controlled visibility without sacrificing speed of release. Developers gain a repeatable API for policy checks. The combined tooling means less guesswork, fewer bypasses, and stronger guarantees that what's deployed behaves as designed.

The gap between policy intent and enforcement is now zero.

See OPA RASP live in minutes. Go to hoop.dev and deploy a working example today.