Important

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Kafka REST Security Plugin Quick Start

Installation

These JAR files must be available in the classpath of the Kafka REST deployment. You can get the files by following the download instructions at Security Plugin Installation.

  • confluent-security-plugins-common-<version>.jar
  • confluent-kafka-rest-security-plugin-<version>.jar

Once the installation is done, the plugins can be activated by adding the following config in the Kafka REST config file

kafka.rest.resource.extension.class=io.confluent.kafkarest.security.KafkaRestSecurityResourceExtension
kafka.rest.resource.extension.class

Fully qualified class name of a valid implementation of the interface RestResourceExtension. This can be used to inject user defined resources like filters. Typically used to add custom capability like logging, security, etc

  • Type: string
  • Default: “”
  • Importance: low

Authentication Mechanisms

The authentication mechanism for the incoming requests is determined by the confluent.rest.auth.propagate.method config. The only only supported mechanism at present is SSL. It is required to set the ssl.client.auth to true in the Kafka REST config to use the SSL mechanism. Failing which, all requests would be rejected with a HTTP error code of 403.

The incoming X500 principal from the client is used as the principal while interacting with all requests to the Kafka Broker. While connecting to the broker, the authentication happens via SSL/SASL depending on the value of client.security.protocol in the Kafka REST config. The details of how the propagation happens and how the security needs to be configured can be found at Principal Propagation

On a high level, the following are required for each of the security protocols:

  • SSL - keystore loaded with all certificates corresponding to all required principal; configured via client.ssl.keystore.type
  • SASL - JAAS config file with KafkaClient section containing all principals along with its login module and options; configured via -Djava.security.auth.login.config.

Refer to Kafka Security for more details.

Configuration

confluent.rest.auth.propagate.method

The mechanism used to authenticate REST Proxy requests. When broker security is enabled, the principal from this authentication mechanism is propagated to Kafka broker requests.

  • Type: string
  • Default: “SSL”
  • Importance: low
confluent.license

Confluent will issue a license key to each subscriber. The license key will be a short snippet of text that you can copy and paste. Without the license key, you can use Confluent Security Plugins for a 30-day trial period. If you are a subscriber and don’t have a license key, please contact Confluent Support at support@confluent.io.

  • Type: string
  • Default: “”
  • Importance: high