About
Samhitha is a full-stack developer at BlackRock, currently leading the UI architecture for the second generation of a high-scale investment management application. She is a University of Southern California alumna with a Master’s degree in CS.
Passionate about youth education and empowering women in STEM, Samhitha advocates for these causes through panel discussions, coding workshops and teaching. She serves as a hackathon mentor and judge, helping young developers refine their skills, and is also a contributor to freeCodeCamp. Outside of work, she loves to paint and has been doing it for over 20 years now.
Building Scalable Access Control Frameworks in React
As applications scale in complexity, managing user permissions becomes a growing challenge. Without a structured approach, permissions quickly become a tangled mess of if-else statements, leading to poor maintainability and scalability.
While Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) provides a strong starting point for managing user access, it is not recommended by OWASP and may not offer the level of granularity needed as your app evolves. In this session, we’ll explore two practical approaches to building scalable permissions systems in React.
First, I’ll introduce CASL, a popular ABAC library that simplifies fine-grained access control. Then, I’ll guide you through building a custom permissions system, tailored to your app’s needs. Throughout the session, I'll conduct detailed code walkthroughs for both approaches, covering key concepts like state management, custom hooks, and caching/conditional queries using Redux Toolkit.
By the end, you'll have the tools to implement a clean and scalable permission systems in React, whether using a pre-built solution or building your own.