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Authentication types

It is strongly recommended to use modern encryption protocols to protect data in transit sent to and from Apache Kafka®. You can use one of the available options in Aiven for Apache Kafka® services.

Transport Layer Security

Transport Layer Security (TLS), also known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is an established standard for securing internet traffic. This method relies on a certificate that is provided by a Certificate Authority (for example, letsencrypt.org ) for your domain. With this certificate and the right technical setup, you can use your domain to encrypt the traffic to your service.

By default Aiven enables TLS encryption for all Aiven for Apache Kafka services and helps with the application, renewal, and configuration of certificates.

There are two ways you can use TLS:

  1. TLS encryption : your Apache Kafka client validates the certificate for your Apache Kafka broker.
  2. TLS authentication : your Apache Kafka client validates the certificate for your Apache Kafka broker and your broker validates the certificate for your client.

Simple Authentication and Security Layer

Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) acts as a layer that allows alternative login methods for your service.

We support SASL/PLAIN and SASL/SCRAM with Aiven for Apache Kafka.

SASL/PLAIN

PLAIN relies on a combination of username and password to log in over a TLS connection, meaning that your traffic is encrypted. To ensure proper security mechanism Aiven does not support using SASL/PLAIN without TLS, because in this case anyone will be able to read your credentials when you send them.

SASL/SCRAM

SCRAM stands for Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism. It is a mechanism that allows a client to identify itself to a server without sending a plain-text password. A key benefit of this is that it does not reveal the password to servers that do not already have it, for example if a client connects to the wrong server even if that server has a valid TLS certificate.

A brief explanation of this is that it creates a random "salt", which is then used to create an "identity" that holds:

  • The "salt"
  • The number of iterations to use (4096 by default)
  • StoredKey (the hash of the client's key)
  • ServerKey

This identity is then by default stored in Apache ZooKeeper™.

Enable SASL authentication

Follow the steps from our article to enable SASL authentication


Apache ZooKeeper is a trademark of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries