US Patent 11327815 Validating policies and data in API authorization system

Some embodiments provide a method for distributing a set of parameters associated with policies for authorizing Application Programming Interface (API) calls to an application. For a previously stored hierarchical first document that comprises a first set of elements in a first hierarchical structure, the method receives a hierarchical update second document that comprises a second set of elements in a second hierarchical structure corresponding to the first hierarchical structure, wherein at least a subset of elements in the first and the second documents correspond to the set of parameters for evaluating API calls. The method receives a first set of hash values for elements of the first document that are not specified in the second document, and generates a second set of hash values for a set of elements specified in the second document. The method generates an overall hash for the second document by using the received first set of hash values and the generated second set of hash values. The method uses the overall hash to validate a signature from an entity that is authorized to specify the set of parameters.