This is quite interesting to me and it is an excelent opportunity to
promote a slightly different security scheme. Object-capabilities are
perfect for online security and would use ACL style authentication to
gain capabilities filtered to those allowed resources for allow
actions (READ/WRITE/DELETE/LIST/SCAN). Erights.org has the
quitenscential (??) object capabilities model and capnproto is
impleemting this for C++. I have a java implementation at http://github.com/pauwau/pauwau
but the master is broken. 0.2 works, basically. B asically a TLS
connection with no certificate server, it is peer to peer. It has
some advanced features, but the lining of capabilities with
authorization so that you can only invoke correct services is extended
to the secure user.
Regarding non-repudiation, on disk, why not prepend a CRC?
Regarding on-disk encryption, multiple users/groups may need to
access, with different capabilities. Sounds like zookeeper needs to
store a cert for each class of access so that a group member can
access the decrypted data from disk. Use cert-based async
decryption. The only isue is storing the private key in zookeeper.
Perhaps some hash magic could be used.
Thanks for kafka,
Rob
On Jun 5, 2014, at 3:01 PM, Jay Kreps wrote:
Hey Joe,
I don't really understand the sections you added to the wiki. Can you
clarify them?
Is non-repudiation what SASL would call integrity checks? If so
don't SSL
and and many of the SASL schemes already support this as well as
on-the-wire encryption?
Or are you proposing an on-disk encryption scheme? Is this actually
needed?
Isn't a on-the-wire encryption when combined with mutual
authentication and
permissions sufficient for most uses?
On-disk encryption seems unnecessary because if an attacker can get
root on
the kafka boxes it can potentially modify Kafka to do anything he or
she
wants with data. So this seems to break any security model.
I understand the problem of a large organization not really having a
trusted network and wanting to secure data transfer and limit and
audit
data access. The uses for these other things I don't totally
understand.
Also it would be worth understanding the state of other messaging and
storage systems (Hadoop, dbs, etc). What features do they support. I
think
there is a sense in which you don't have to run faster than the
bear, but
only faster then your friends. :-)
-Jay
On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Joe Stein <joe.st...@stealth.ly>
wrote:
I like the idea of working on the spec and prioritizing. I will
update the
wiki.
- Joestein
On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 1:11 PM, Jay Kreps <jay.kr...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hey Joe,
Thanks for kicking this discussion off! I totally agree that for
something
that acts as a central message broker security is critical
feature. I
think
a number of people have been interested in this topic and several
people
have put effort into special purpose security efforts.
Since most the LinkedIn folks are working on the consumer right
now I
think
this would be a great project for any other interested people to
take on.
There are some challenges in doing these things distributed but it
can
also
be a lot of fun.
I think a good first step would be to get a written plan we can
all agree
on for how things should work. Then we can break things down into
chunks
that can be done independently while still aiming at a good end
state.
I had tried to write up some notes that summarized at least the
thoughts
I
had had on security:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Security
What do you think of that?
One assumption I had (which may be incorrect) is that although we
want
all
the things in your list, the two most pressing would be
authentication
and
authorization, and that was all that write up covered. You have more
experience in this domain, so I wonder how you would prioritize?
Those notes are really sketchy, so I think the first goal I would
have
would be to get to a real spec we can all agree on and discuss. A
lot of
the security stuff has a high human interaction element and needs
to work
in pretty different domains and different companies so getting
this kind
of
review is important.
-Jay
On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Joe Stein <joe.st...@stealth.ly>
wrote:
Hi,I wanted to re-ignite the discussion around Apache Kafka
Security.
This
is a huge bottleneck (non-starter in some cases) for a lot of
organizations
(due to regulatory, compliance and other requirements). Below are
my
suggestions for specific changes in Kafka to accommodate security
requirements. This comes from what folks are doing "in the wild"
to
workaround and implement security with Kafka as it is today and
also
what I
have discovered from organizations about their blockers. It also
picks
up
from the wiki (which I should have time to update later in the week
based
on the below and feedback from the thread).
1) Transport Layer Security (i.e. SSL)
This also includes client authentication in addition to in-transit
security
layer. This work has been picked up here
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1477 and do
appreciate any
thoughts, comments, feedback, tomatoes, whatever for this patch.
It
is a
pickup from the fork of the work first done here
https://github.com/relango/kafka/tree/kafka_security.
2) Data encryption at rest.
This is very important and something that can be facilitated
within the
wire protocol. It requires an additional map data structure for the
"encrypted [data encryption key]". With this map (either in your
object
or
in the wire protocol) you can store the dynamically generated
symmetric
key
(for each message) and then encrypt the data using that dynamically
generated key. You then encrypt the encryption key using each
public
key
for whom is expected to be able to decrypt the encryption key to
then
decrypt the message. For each public key encrypted symmetric key
(which
is
now the "encrypted [data encryption key]" along with which public
key
it
was encrypted with for (so a map of [publicKey] =
encryptedDataEncryptionKey) as a chain. Other patterns can be
implemented
but this is a pretty standard digital enveloping [0] pattern with
only
1
field added. Other patterns should be able to use that field to-do
their
implementation too.
3) Non-repudiation and long term non-repudiation.
Non-repudiation is proving data hasn't changed. This is often
(if not
always) done with x509 public certificates (chained to a
certificate
authority).
Long term non-repudiation is what happens when the certificates
of the
certificate authority are expired (or revoked) and everything ever
signed
(ever) with that certificate's public key then becomes "no longer
provable
as ever being authentic". That is where RFC3126 [1] and RFC3161
[2]
come
in (or worm drives [hardware], etc).
For either (or both) of these it is an operation of the encryptor
to
sign/hash the data (with or without third party trusted timestap
of the
signing event) and encrypt that with their own private key and
distribute
the results (before and after encrypting if required) along with
their
public key. This structure is a bit more complex but feasible, it
is a
map
of digital signature formats and the chain of dig sig attestations.
The
map's key being the method (i.e. CRC32, PKCS7 [3], XmlDigSig [4])
and
then
a list of map where that key is "purpose" of signature (what your
attesting
too). As a sibling field to the list another field for "the
attester"
as
bytes (e.g. their PKCS12 [5] for the map of PKCS7 signatures).
4) Authorization
We should have a policy of "404" for data, topics, partitions
(etc) if
authenticated connections do not have access. In "secure mode"
any non
authenticated connections should get a "404" type message on
everything.
Knowing "something is there" is a security risk in many uses
cases. So
if
you don't have access you don't even see it. Baking "that" into
Kafka
along with some interface for entitlement (access management)
systems
(pretty standard) is all that I think needs to be done to the core
project.
I want to tackle item later in the year after summer after the
other
three
are complete.
I look forward to thoughts on this and anyone else interested in
working
with us on these items.
[0]
http://www.emc.com/emc-plus/rsa-labs/standards-initiatives/what-is-a-digital-envelope.htm
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3126
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161
[3]
http://www.emc.com/emc-plus/rsa-labs/standards-initiatives/pkcs-7-cryptographic-message-syntax-standar.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Signature
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKCS_12
/*******************************************
Joe Stein
Founder, Principal Consultant
Big Data Open Source Security LLC
http://www.stealth.ly
Twitter: @allthingshadoop <http://www.twitter.com/allthingshadoop>
********************************************/
