API Access Policies for Applications

API Access Policies for Applications enables you to control how applications access your APIs registered in Auth0. These policies define how applications interact with an API, such as whether they can successfully obtain an access token to access the API’s resources.

You can configure the application API access policy for each API registered in the Auth0 Dashboard. To learn more, read Configure API application access policy.

User access vs. client access flows

You can configure separate application API access policies for user access and client (machine-to-machine) access flows:

  • Client access: used for machine-to-machine access, which corresponds to the Client Credentials Flow.

  • User access: used for all access flows that generate an access token associated with an end-user, allowing the application to access an API on the user’s behalf. User access flows do not include the Client Credentials Flow. To learn more about user access flows, read Authentication and Authorization Flows.

Application API access policies

The application API access policies are:

Policy Description Access Flow
allow_all When configured for an API, any application in your tenant can get an access token to the API. No specific grant is required. The default for user access flows when you create an API. You can only configure allow_all for user access flows.
require_client_grant When configured for an API, only applications with a client grant defined can get an access token for the API. The client grant establishes the maximum permissions an application can request from the API. To learn more about how to create and manage client grants, read Application Access to APIs: Client Grants. The default for the Client Credentials Flow when you create an API.
deny_all When configured for an API, no application can get an access token to the API, regardless of any other settings or grants. Access is completely restricted. You can configure deny_all for both user and client access flows.

When configuring an API’s application access policy, Auth0 recommends using require_client_grant, which follows a least privilege principle approach. To learn more, read Application Access to APIs: Client Grants.

When you set the application access policy for an API to require_client_grant, you must explicitly provide the required scopes as part of the token request. This does not apply to refresh token requests, where if you omit the scopes, the authorization server assumes the application wants all the scopes it was granted in the original access token. As a result, the authorization server returns an access token with the same scopes originally granted by the resource owner.

Configure API application access policy

You can configure an API’s application access policy by updating its subject_type_authorization property on the resource-servers collection. 

The subject_type_authorization object contains two nested objects, user and client, each with a policy attribute that you can set to one of the three access policies defined in Application API access policies.

Existing API

To configure the application access policy for an existing API, make a PATCH request to the /resource-servers/{id} endpoint and pass a subject_type_authorization object that specifies the policies for both user and client access types.

The following code sample demonstrates how to set different access policies for user and client access types for an existing API:

  • The user policy is set to require_client_grant, meaning applications must have a client grant to access the API on the user’s behalf.

  • The client policy is set to deny_all, which restricts machine-to-machine access to this API.

curl --location --request PATCH 'https://{yourDomain}/api/v2/resource-servers/{RESOURCE_SERVER_ID}' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_MANAGEMENT_API_TOKEN}' \
--data '{
    "subject_type_authorization": {
        "user": {
            "policy": "require_client_grant"
        },
        "client": {
            "policy": "deny_all"
        }
    }
}'

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New API

To configure the application access policy when creating a new API, make a POST request to the /resource-servers endpoint and pass a subject_type_authorization object that specifies the policies for both user and client access types.

The following code sample demonstrates how to set different access policies for user and client access types when creating a new API:

  • The user policy is set to require_client_grant, meaning applications must have a client grant to access the API on the user’s behalf.

  • The client policy is set to deny_all, which restricts machine-to-machine access to this API.

curl --location 'https://{yourDomain}/api/v2/resource-servers' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer {YOUR_MANAGEMENT_API_TOKEN}' \
--data '{
  "name": "{YOUR_NEW_API_NAME}",
  "identifier": "{YOUR_NEW_API_IDENTIFIER}",
  "scopes": [
    {
      "value": "{SCOPE_VALUE}",
      "description": "{SCOPE_DESCRIPTION}"
    }
  ],
  "subject_type_authorization": {
    "user": {
      "policy": "require_client_grant"
    },
    "client": {
      "policy": "deny_all"
    }
  }
}'

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