"Secure RAG Authorization: Row‑Level Security, ACLs, and Per‑User Retrieval"

Modern RAG systems don’t fail because models are “unsafe”—they fail because retrieval quietly breaks authorization. This book is for experienced engineers, security architects, and platform teams building multi-tenant, tool-using AI systems where every retrieved chunk must be correct for the requesting principal. It treats “secure per-user retrieval” as an end-to-end invariant across ingestion, indexing, search, tool calls, and prompt construction—where a single bypass path can become a data leak.

You’ll learn to model principals and session context, design tokens and on-behalf-of flows, and translate business sharing rules into enforceable semantics using RBAC, ABAC, ReBAC, and real-world ACL evaluation. The book dives into PDP/PEP architecture choices, fail-closed behavior, and bypass elimination; implements database-native controls with row-level security and planner-resistant SQL patterns; and builds auth-aware vector indexes with revocation, tombstones, strict pre-filters, and safe post-filtering backstops. Threat modeling, audit logging, detection engineering, and rigorous authorization test strategies show how to prove correctness at scale.

Assumes comfort with distributed systems, identity/IAM, and production databases/vector stores. The differentiator is pragmatic, production-focused guidance: reference architectures, anti-patterns, and decision criteria that connect policy design to operational reality.