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Status

Current state: DISCUSS

Discussion thread: https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@kafka.apache.org/msg101011.html

JIRA: Unable to render Jira issues macro, execution error.

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

Motivation

Kafka adoption is growing day-by-day and it is used by all sizes of organizations serving varied technical and business domains like banking, entertainment, food/transportation logistics, financial technology to name a few. These organizations depending upon their size and domain may have more internal and external InfoSec/AppSec/Compliance standards they have to meet while using Kafka. SSL/TLS communication is very critical part of those standards. While Kafka supports SSL communication sometimes it becomes challenging to use out-of-the-box solution provided by Kafka for SSL/TLS given the organization's needs.

Currently Kafka provides several SSL related configurations that typically starts with 'ssl.' prefix. Those configurations focuses on ability to specify Keystore and Truststores parameters, supply custom java security Providers etc. However as mentioned before there is still room to allow more flexibility/extensibility to allow organizations to fully comply to their requirement without one-off customizations of Kafka.

According to JSSE Documentation SSLContext and SSLEngine are the endpoint classes for the secure connection. Moreover, SSLEngine is created by SSLContext and can be further customized according to the needs. Hence if Kafka provides a way to customize SSLContext and/or SSLEngine it would be a great lever and provide the ultimate extensibility for Kafka users.

This work is influenced by past KIPs (mentioned below) and is a fresh attempt to provide a conclusive solution. It also got more energy from discussion on KIP-486: Support custom way to load KeyStore and TrustStore.

Past KIPs,

KIP-76 Enable getting password from executable rather than passing as plaintext in config files

KIP-383: Pluggable interface for SSL Factory

This KIP proposes the work on top of what has been done already for SSL configuration like KIP-226 - Dynamic Broker Configuration and KIP-492: Add java security providers in Kafka Security config.

Our primary goal is: Instead of keep adding various ssl configurations to customize smaller portions of SSLContext/Engine, we should have a single configurable/pluggable SSLContext/Engine functionality.


Pluggable SSLContext or SSLEngine?

Java's Security Providers architecture already enables using custom SSLEngine by using the right JSSE compatible Provider like BouncyCastleJsseProvider. We could use any SSLEngine of the  TLS implementations as far as we have JSSE compatible provider available. We can use Kafka's 'security.providers' configuration to use a custom provider.

Making javax.net.ssl.SSLContext setup pluggable provides flexibility for providing Key Material, Secure Random implementation and configure Key/Trust managers in a custom way. Example: Apache HttpComponents and Netty SslContextBuilder. 

Hence we feel we should make SSLContext initialization pluggable.

Public Interfaces

New configuration

ssl.context.factory.class - This configuration will take class of the below interface's type and will be used to create javax.net.ssl.SSLContext object.

Default value will be as mentioned below.

final static String SSL_CONTEXT_FACTORY_CLASS_CONFIG = "ssl.context.factory.class";
final static String DEFAULT_SSL_CONTEXT_FACTORY_CLASS = "org.apache.kafka.common.security.ssl.DefaultSslContextFactory";


Interface for SSLContextFactory

Below is the interface suggested for this.

package org.apache.kafka.common.security.ssl;

import javax.net.ssl.SSLContext;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Set;

public interface SslContextFactory {

    /**
     * Returns SSLContext loaded by this factory.
     *
     * @return 
     */
    SSLContext createSSLContext();

    /**
     * Returns the currently used configurations by this object.
     * @return
     */
    Map<String, Object> configs();

    /**
     * Returns the reconfigurable configs used by this object.
     * @return
     */
    Set<String> reconfigurableConfigs();

    /**
     * Returns true if the SSLContext needs to be rebuilt.
     *
     * @param nextConfigs       The configuration we want to use.
     * @return                  True only if the SSLContext should be rebuilt.
     */
    boolean shouldRebuiltFor(Map<String, Object> nextConfigs);
}


Proposed Changes

Currently SslFactory.java uses SslEngineBuilder.java. Instead of that we will modify SslFactory.java to load a class configured via the new configuration 'ssl.engine.factory.class' and delegate the SSLEngine creation call to the implementation. 

We will also provide default implementation for the 'ssl.engine.factory.class' which will be used in absence of provided config.

Default implementation would be very similar to the current SslEngineBuilder.java.

Which classes will be deleted?

  • SslEngineBuilder.java (functionality of SSLContext loading will be moved to DefaultSslContextFactory.java and createEngine() method will move to SslFactory.java)

Which classes will be added?

  • SslContextFactory.java Interface
  • DefaultSslContextFactory.java (mostly having code from existing SslEngineBuilder)

Which classes will be modified primarily?

  • SslFactory.java
    • Will host the createEngine() method from current SslEngineBuilder and will have mechanism to load the SslContextFactory implementation

How does configs get to the implementation class?

The configuration of Map will be passed to the implementation class via the constructor. See below example,


public DefaultSslContextFactory(Map<String, ?> configs) {
...
...
}


These configuration will be passed from SslFactory to the implementation of the SslContextFactory interface via reflection like below

public class SslFactory implement Reconfigurable {
...
...
     sslContextFactoryClass.getDeclaredConstructor(Map.class).newInstance(configs);
...
}


Sequence Diagrams for important interactions

SslFactory and SslContextFactory Interaction


Support for reconfiguration of custom configs

By custom configs we mean the configs used by the SslContextFactory's implementation. Those configs does not have to be part of definition of Kafka configs since only the implementation class knows what are those. Kafka already supports custom configs so this should not be a new challenge. 

Other challenge

Currently reconfigurations are pushed from Kafka code base to the reconfigurable classes. However, depending upon SslContextFactory's implementation we could have some events/changes detected by the implementation first and we would need to trigger reconfiguration on SslFactory in order to get re-initialized!

Probably this could be achieved by passing listener to those implementation changes but this needs to be further explored

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

  • What impact (if any) will there be on existing users?

There will be no impact on existing users who do not specify the new configuration.

  • If we are changing behavior how will we phase out the older behavior?

No impact

  • If we need special migration tools, describe them here.

None

  • When will we remove the existing behavior?

Not applicable since old code behavior will be kept with default implementation of DefaultSslContextFactory and modification to SslFactory class.

Rejected Alternatives

Make SSLEngine pluggable

As noted in the motivation section- Java's Security Providers architecture already enables using custom SSLEngine by using the right JSSE compatible Provider hence Kafka should not have to derive another way to make SSLEngine pluggable.

Making SslFactory the pluggable interface (KIP-383)

This is because currently SslFactory does certain validations which we want to keep separate and mandate those checks across any possible implementation of pluggable ssl context class. Also, once we start writing the reconfigurable classes we realize that we need two classes - 1) SslContextFactory implementation and 2) Container of the factory implementation. We believe that keeping SslFactory as Reconfigurable object and help reconfigure the underlying SslContextFactory will simplify the implementations of SslContextFactory.

Also, we rejected to make SslContextFactory extend the Reconfigurable interface due to following reason,

There will be good amount of state in the SslContextFactory's implementation (as it will be similar to the current SslEngineBuilder class). We believe that making SSLContext creation pluggable is worth to allow SSL experts to write their own implementation having the SSL domain knowledge and keep them free of knowing much about Kafka's reconfigurability - example: Apache HttpComponents. We prefer SslFactory class to do what it is doing right now and keep the responsibility of re-creating underlying SslContextFactory object based on the configurations specified by the SslContextFactory's implementation.

Creating builder for SSLContext

Creating a builder interface with options to build SSLContext will need to have method(s) to allow keys/trusted-certs. It will also require us to have 'key-password' as input for the keystore. In the current Kafka implementation it requires the password to be configured in the plaintext via 'ssl.key.password', 'ssl.keystore.password' and 'ssl.truststore.password'. If we need to customize how the password is loaded, due to security reasons, this approach will not work since some other mechanism for making password pluggable (See KIP-76 Enable getting password from executable rather than passing as plaintext in config files AND KIP-486: Support custom way to load KeyStore and TrustStore) need to be devised which will add more ssl related configurations to Kafka.




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