An authorization method using provisioned certificates is disclosed. The method includes writing security attributes to fields within a certificate and issuing the certificate to a software application on a principal node. The software application requests to perform actions on one or more resources on a resource node, sending one or more action requests along with a copy of its certificate. The resource node has an agent which verifies the permissions from the certificate and routes the request to its designated resource. The resource node returns one or more messages to the principal node, verifying whether or not complete the requests.