Status

Current state: "Under Discussion"

Discussion thread: here

JIRA: here

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

It has been a common request to be able to customize SslFactory beyond the existing configuration options. For example, users want encrypted passwords, an alias to choose a certificate, OCSP support, etc. For these, alternative config options make the most sense because these are generic config options that are useful in many environments, so we should support these without having to write Java code.

There are situations where adding configuration options will never be able to satisfy the requirement. For example, the user may need to reuse an existing SSL implementation or share an implementation across multiple applications. For those cases, the simplest approach would be to support the customization of the SslFactory implementation.

A custom SslFactory implementation might also serve as a stop gap measure when a user needs an SSL feature immediately but the necessary configuration option is not yet available.

Of course it would be easy to simply change the Kafka source code and ship a customized distribution. The idea is you should be able to replace the implementation through configuration, without rebuilding a custom Kafka distribution or resorting to classpath tricks to shadow Kafka classes.

Public Interfaces

This KIP will introduce a new common configuration option ssl.sslfactory.class to be added to SslConfigs

A new interface PluggableSslFactory will be created. An implementation of PluggableSslFactory will use the new config keys ssl.mode and ssl.verify.keystore.using.truststore internally so they must be documented but they  will not appear as ConfigDefs in SslConfigs.

The non-default constructors of SslFactory will be deprecated and a new default constructor will be added.

Proposed Changes

A new public interface will be defined:

public interface PluggableSslFactory extends Reconfigurable {
public SSLEngine createSslEngine(String peerHost, int peerPort);
}

A new configuration option will be added to SslConfigs:
public static final String SSL_SSLFACTORY_CLASS_CONFIG = "ssl.sslfactory.class";
public static final String SSL_SSLFACTORY_CLASS_DOC = "...";
public static final String DEFAULT_SSL_SSLFACTORY_CLASS = "org.apache.kafka.common.security.ssl.SslFactory";

config.define(SslConfigs.SSL_SSLFACTORY_CLASS_CONFIG, ConfigDef.Type.CLASS, SslConfigs.DEFAULT_SSL_SSLFACTORY_CLASS, ConfigDef.Importance.LOW, SslConfigs.SSL_SSLFACTORY_CLASS_DOC)

In SaslChannelBuilder and SslChannelBuilder, the type of the member sslFactory will be changed to PluggableSslFactory. Instead of calling the SslFactory constructor directly, we will call a new method createSslFactory(). This method will be duplicated in both channel builders.

createSslFactory() will alter (a copy of?) the configs to contain the values for what used to be passed as arguments in the SslFactory constructor. The SSL mode will be stored with the key ssl.mode; if not null clientAuthConfigOverride will be stored with the key ssl.client.auth overwriting the value already there; keystoreVerifiableUsingTruststore will be stored with the key ssl.verify.keystore.using.truststore; The new keys ssl.mode and ssl.verify.keystore.using.truststore are private. We will define them as constants in SslConfigs but they will not have associated ConfigDefs. createSslFactory() will call the default constructor of the pluggable SSL Interface by calling Class.newInstance() followed by a call to configure() to pass the configs.

The class comment of the PluggableSslFactory interface will document the necessary default constructor and the private keys ssl.mode and ssl.verify.keystore.using.truststore

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

This KIP is backwards compatible. Most applications will create the SslFactory through the SslChannelBuilder or the SaslChannelBuilder which will hide the changes.

The default value for the config ssl.sslfactory.class is org.apache.kafka.common.security.ssl.SslFactory which selects the existing implementation.

The non-default constructors of SslFactory will be preserved and marked as deprecated. The constructor arguments will override the configs, just like clientAuthConfigOverride did, but now for all three arguments.

The new config keys ssl.mode and ssl.verify.keystore.using.truststore are private. They should not be configurable by the user.

The EchoServer used in the tests could be updated to use PluggableSslFactory. It is suggested to keep it the way it is to test backwards compatibility. 

Rejected Alternatives

Kafka could define a new configuration option to hold an instance of SSLSocketFactory. This is similar to many Java libraries that accept an instance of SSLSocketFactory. This was rejected because Kafka tries to be language neutral. It was thought it would make it more difficult to support C and Python.

Ideally, the interface should be called SslFactory and the built-in implementation should be called DefaultSslFactory. This was rejected to improve backwards compatibility for applications that call the SslFactory directly.

Kafka's naming convention does not use a special tag for interfaces. Accordingly, these names were rejected ISslFactory, SslFactoryIFace, SslFactoryInterface.

The only call to SslFactory.sslContext() is in EchoServer which is part of the client tests. We felt this was not a strong enough motivation to add sslContext() to the PluggableSslFactory interface, especially if EchoServer continues to call SslFactory directly.

Kafka is not consistent to name configs that hold class names. Compare [partitioner.class, interceptor.classes, principal.builder.class, sasl.server.callback.handler.class, sasl.client.callback.handler.class, sasl.login.class] versus [key.deserializer, value.deserializer, key.serializer, value.serializer]. It appears the serializer/deserializer configs are a special case. Therefore the name ssl.sslfactory.class was selected instead of ssl.sslfactory

We could require the Pluggable SSL Factory implementation to have the same 3-argument constructor as SslFactory. We find the arguments clientAuthConfigOverride and keystoreVerifiableUsingTruststore are somewhat arbitrary for a general pluggable interface. We prefer to use a default constructor for the pluggable SSL Factory implementation. This does not alter backwards compatibility because it is easy to keep the non-default constructors in SslFactory and have those values override whatever is in the configs.

We need the ability to send custom configuration options to the PluggableSslFactory implementation. Should this be another KIP?