Security Overview

Confluent Platform is the central nervous system for a business, uniting your organization around an Apache Kafka®-based single source of truth. It is frequently used to store mission-critical data, and therefore enabling security features are crucial.

By default, there is no encryption or authentication, nor are ACLs configured. Any client can communicate to Kafka brokers using the PLAINTEXT port. It is critical that access using this port is restricted to trusted clients only. Network segmentation and/or authorization ACLs can be used to restrict access to trusted IPs in such cases. If neither is used, then the cluster is wide open and can be accessed by anyone.

While non-secured clusters are supported, as are a mix of authenticated, unauthenticated, encrypted and non-encrypted clients, it is recommended to secure the components in your Confluent deployment.

To learn more, refer to Best Practices to Secure Your Apache Kafka Deployment.

To see a working deployment of encryption, authentication, and authorization configured end-to-end across all Confluent Platform components, check out the Confluent Platform demo.