A system and methods for applying capability-based authorization within a distributed computing environment. Instead of associating permissions or privileges with objects (e.g., computing resources), permissions are associated with subjects (e.g., users, roles). Compared to object-based methods of access control, such as Access Control Lists (ACL), management of capability-based authorizations scales much better as the number of objects becomes very large. A central repository allows changes to the authorization framework (e.g., new subjects, modified permissions) to be made once. The changes can then be propagated across, and applied to, multiple address spaces instead of having to individually or manually update each local node or address space.