Note: Please check the security documentation for the features that Kafka supports today. This page is no longer maintained, but it is kept for historical reasons.

Overview

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1. support authentication of client (i.e. consumer & producer) connections to brokers
2. support authorization of the assorted operations that can take place over those connections
3. support encrypting those connections
4. support security principals representing interactive users, user groups, and long-running services
5. security should be optional; installations that don't want the above features shouldn't have to pay for them
6. preserve backward compatibility; in particular, extant third-party clients should still work

Current implementation efforts are tracked in KAFKA-1682.

Features In Scope

• Authentication via SSL & Kerberos through SASL
• Auditing
• Authorization through Unix-like users, permissions and ACLs
• Encryption over the wire (optional)
• It should be easy to enforce the use of security at a given site

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All authentication operations will be logged to file by the Kafka code (i.e. this will not be pluggable).  The implementation should use a dedicated logger so as to 1) segregate security logging & 2) support keeping the audit log in a separate (presumably secured) location.

Encryption

For performance reasons, we propose making encryption optional. When using Kerberos (via SASL & GSS-API), there are explicit parameters through which clients can signal their interest in encryption (similarly for SSL).

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