Kafka Security¶
In the 0.9.0.0 release, the Kafka community added a number of features that, used either separately or together, increase security in a Kafka cluster. These features are considered to be of beta quality. The following security measures are currently supported:
- Authentication of connections to brokers from clients (producers and consumers), other brokers and tools, using either SSL or SASL (Kerberos)
- Authentication of connections from brokers to ZooKeeper
- Encryption of data transferred between brokers and clients, between brokers, or between brokers and tools using SSL (Note that there is a performance degradation when SSL is enabled, the magnitude of which depends on the CPU type and the JVM implementation.)
- Authorization of read / write operations by clients
- Authorization is pluggable and integration with external authorization services is supported
It’s worth noting that security is optional - non-secured clusters are supported, as well as a mix of authenticated, unauthenticated, encrypted and non-encrypted clients.
The Schema Registry and REST Proxy do not support Kafka’s security features yet. This is planned for a future release.
The guides below explain how to configure and use the security features in both clients and brokers.