Zero Standing Privilege with Open Policy Agent

The admin tokens are gone. No one, and nothing, holds standing privilege anymore.

This is the promise of Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP)—and with Open Policy Agent (OPA), it’s not just possible, it’s enforceable.

Zero Standing Privilege means every access right is temporary, granted only when needed, and revoked immediately after use. There are no dormant credentials, no “just in case” permissions. Attack surfaces shrink to the size of a single request. Lateral movement dies before it starts.

OPA turns ZSP from a security principle into a working reality. It works as a policy engine that evaluates every access decision at runtime. Instead of static role bindings in some IAM system, OPA checks incoming requests against a source-of-truth policy. This policy can pull context—user identity, action type, resource sensitivity, time limits—and decide dynamically if access is allowed or denied.

When paired with ephemeral credential systems, OPA prevents privileges from ever existing beyond the exact moment they’re needed. Engineers can integrate OPA into Kubernetes, microservices, API gateways, or CI/CD pipelines. Each request becomes a controlled transaction with an explicit, time-bound approval.

Implementing ZSP with OPA often starts by:

• Rewriting IAM logic as Rego policies to capture rules and conditions.
• Hooking decision points into OPA through sidecars, admission controllers, or middleware.
• Integrating an access orchestration layer to create and revoke credentials automatically.

The benefits stack fast. Audit logs show every access decision with full context. Incident response moves from guesswork to exact replay of policy events. Compliance checks become queries against historical policy executions.

Zero Standing Privilege is not theory. With OPA, it’s code. And it’s deployable today.

See it live in minutes at hoop.dev and turn ZSP into your default operating mode.