Capability Governance Architecture
How Formal Verification and Token Integrity Are Transforming Enterprise Security
The End of Manual Governance
Identity governance as we know it has reached its limits. Traditional IGA tools manage users and roles, but they can’t model how modern applications actually work. As systems multiply, entitlements sprawl, certifications lose meaning, and security risks slip through the cracks.
Enterprises need a new way to govern authorization — one that’s rooted in formal assurance. That approach is called Capability Governance.
What Is Capability Governance?
Capability Governance is the practice of managing how authorization policies, tokens, and identity systems interact — so CISOs can govern risk with proof.
Instead of relying on manual certification campaigns, Capability Governance uses formal verification to mathematically prove that policies behave correctly, and cryptographic trust management to ensure every token is valid and traceable.
It’s governance as a continuous process — an architecture designed to make trust measurable, analyzable, and automatable.
The Design Goals
The Capability Governance architecture is built around five core design principles that ensure security isn’t just enforced — but proven.
- Governed by Design Every policy, schema, and federation change follows the same rigor as modern DevOps. Code reviews, audit trails, and automated gates make governance continuous, not periodic.
- Provable by Design Policies are verified using formal methods and theorem provers — checking for logical errors, conflicts, and unintended overlaps. Authorization decisions move from “assumed safe” to mathematically guaranteed.
- Declarative by Design Access is defined in terms of capabilities — the combination of an Action and a Resource. This aligns governance with business operations, not just identity data.
- Interoperable by Design Built on open standards like OAuth, OpenID Connect, and federation protocols, Capability Governance unifies policies and tokens across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem systems.
- Observable by Design Every decision, event, and token is logged and analyzable. Built-in observability enables continuous assurance and rapid detection of anomalies.
These principles ensure that governance evolves from a static compliance function to a living architecture of trust.
The Trust Hub: a Command Center for Authorization
At the core of this architecture is the Trust Hub — the central platform that orchestrates policy, schema, federation, and capability management across the enterprise.
It provides:
- Canonical Schema Management — One shared source of truth for entities, attributes, and relationships.
- Policy Governance — Formal verification, cross-store analysis, and version-controlled deployment.
- Federation & Token Trust — Management of JWT issuers, validation rules, and chain-of-trust verification.
- Capability Registry — A catalog of enterprise actions and resources enriched with ownership, risk, and policy lineage.
The result: consistent, provable, and federated authorization across every system.
How the Architecture Works
Capability Governance operates across four logical planes, each reinforcing the others:
- Authoring & Analysis Plane — Policies and schemas are authored and verified using formal reasoning tools like CVC5.
- Release & Distribution Plane — Verified artifacts are packaged, reviewed, and deployed through automated CI/CD gates.
- Runtime Decision Plane — Policies and tokens are evaluated in real time, enriched with contextual and risk signals.
- Telemetry & Assurance Plane — Logs, analytics, and metrics provide evidence for continuous validation and audit.
This creates a closed loop: author → release → enforce → observe → improve.
The Governance Lifecycle
The process is as disciplined as the architecture. Each change flows through a phased lifecycle — from discovery and modeling, to proof, approval, release, and continuous improvement.
Every step is governed by evidence: mathematical proofs, audit trails, and impact assessments ensure accountability and traceability.
Why It Matters
Capability Governance transforms authorization from a human bottleneck into an automated assurance system. It brings:
- Mathematical certainty that policies behave as intended.
- Cross-domain trust through open federation.
- Continuous observability for real-time assurance.
- Reduced operational risk and faster policy delivery.
The Future of Enterprise Security
The future of enterprise security isn’t just about access control — it’s about proving trust.
Capability Governance provides the architecture, process, and math to make that proof real. Because in a world of dynamic systems and autonomous agents, trust can no longer be assumed. It must be governed with proof.
To read about Capability Governance Architecture in a lot more detail as it evolves, check out the Janssen Project Github Wiki
Book a meeting with Gluu to find out more: https://gluu.org/booking
