Kafka security
When designed and developed at LinkedIn, security was kept out to a large extent. Security for Kafka was an afterthought after it became a main project at Apache. Later on in the year 2014, various security discussions were considered for Kafka, especially data at rest security and transport layer security.
Kafka broker allows clients to connect to multiple ports and each port supports a different security mechanism, as detailed here:
- No wire encryption and authentication
- SSL: wire encryption and authentication
- SASL: Kerberos authentication
- SSL + SASL: SSL is for wire encryption and SASL for authentication
- Authorization similar to Unix permissions for read/write by a client
These security features are led by Confluent and more details can be found at http://docs.confluent.io/2.0.0/kafka/security.html.
