Cryptography
This document describes the cryptography used by Charmed Apache Kafka K8s.
Resource checksums
Charmed Apache Kafka K8s and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper K8s operators use pinned revisions of their respective rocks to provide reproducible and secure environments.
The Charmed Apache Kafka rock and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper rock are OCI images derived from their respective snaps. These snaps package the Apache Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper workloads along with the necessary dependencies and utilities required for the operators’ lifecycle. See the snap contents for the Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper.
Every artifact bundled into the Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper snaps is verified against their MD5, SHA256, or SHA512 checksum after download. The installation of certified snaps into the rock is ensured by snap primitives that verify their squashfs filesystems images GPG signature. For more information on the snap verification process, refer to the snapcraft.io documentation.
Sources verification
Charmed Apache Kafka sources are stored in:
- GitHub repositories for snaps, rocks and charms
- LaunchPad repositories for the Apache Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper upstream fork used for building their respective distributions
LaunchPad
Distributions are built using private repositories only, hosted as part of the SOSS namespace to eventually integrate with Canonical’s standard process for fixing CVEs. Branches associated with releases are mirrored to a public repository, hosted in the Data Platform namespace to also provide the community with the patched source code.
GitHub
All Apache Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper artifacts built by Canonical are published and released programmatically using release pipelines implemented via GitHub Actions. Distributions are published as both GitHub and LaunchPad releases via the central-uploader repository, while charms, snaps and rocks are published using the workflows of their respective repositories.
All repositories in GitHub are set up with branch protection rules, requiring:
- new commits to be merged to main branches via pull request with at least 2 approvals from repository maintainers
- new commits to be signed (e.g. using GPG keys)
- developers to sign the Canonical Contributor License Agreement (CLA)
Encryption
Charmed Apache Kafka can be used to deploy a secure Apache Kafka cluster on K8s that provides encryption-in-transit capabilities out of the box for:
- Interbroker communications
- Apache ZooKeeper connection
- External client connection
To set up a secure connection Charmed Apache Kafka and Charmed Apache ZooKeeper need to be integrated with TLS Certificate Provider charms, e.g.
self-signed-certificates operator. Certificate Singing Requests (CSRs) are generated for every unit using the tls_certificates_interface library that uses the cryptography
Python library to create X.509 compatible certificates. The CSR is signed by the TLS Certificate Provider, returned to the units, and
stored in a password-protected Keystore file. The password of the Keystore is stored in Juju secrets starting from revision 168 of Charmed Apache Kafka
and revision 130 of Charmed Apache ZooKeeper. The relation also provides the CA certificate, which is loaded into a password-protected Truststore file.
When encryption is enabled, hostname verification is turned on for client connections, including inter-broker communication. The cipher suite can be customized by specifying a list of allowed cipher suites for external clients and Apache ZooKeeper connections. This is done using the charm configuration options ssl_cipher_suites and zookeeper_ssl_cipher_suites, respectively (see reference documentation).
Encryption at rest is currently not supported, although it can be provided by the substrate (cloud or on-premises).
Authentication
In Charmed Apache Kafka, authentication layers can be enabled for:
- Apache ZooKeeper connections
- Apache Kafka inter-broker communication
- Apache Kafka clients
Apache Kafka authentication to Apache ZooKeeper
Authentication to Apache ZooKeeper is based on Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) using digested MD5 hashes of username and password, and implemented both for client-server (with Apache Kafka) and server-server communication. Username and passwords are exchanged using peer relations among Apache ZooKeeper units and using normal relations between Apache Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper. Juju secrets are used for exchanging credentials starting from revision 168 of Apache Kafka and revision 130 of Apache ZooKeeper.
Usernames and passwords for different users are stored in Apache ZooKeeper servers in a JAAS configuration file in plain text format. Permissions on the file are restricted to the root user only.
Apache Kafka Inter-broker authentication
Authentication among brokers is based on the SCRAM-SHA-512 protocol. Usernames and passwords are exchanged via peer relations, using Juju secrets from revision 168 of Charmed Apache Kafka.
The Apache Kafka username and password, used by brokers to authenticate each other, are stored both in an Apache ZooKeeper zNode and in a JAAS configuration file on the Apache Kafka server in plain text format.
The file needs to be readable and writable by root (as it is created by the charm) and readable by the snap_daemon user running the Charmed Apache Kafka server snap commands.
Client authentication to Apache Kafka
Clients can authenticate to Kafka using:
- username and password exchanged using SCRAM-SHA-512 protocols
- client certificates or CAs (mTLS)
When using SCRAM, usernames and passwords are stored in Apache ZooKeeper to be used by the Apache Kafka processes, in peer-relation data to be used by the Apache Kafka charm and in external relation to be shared with client applications. Starting from revision 168 of Charmed Apache Kafka, Juju secrets are used for storing the credentials instead of plain text.
When using mTLS, client certificates are loaded into a tls-certificates operator and provided to the Charmed Apache Kafka via the plain-text unencrypted
relation. Certificates are stored in the password-protected Truststore file.