Critical Description
Kafka's clients and protocol exposes unauthorized topics to the end user. This is often considered a security hole. To some, the topic name is considered sensitive information. Those that do not consider the name sensitive, still consider it more information that allows a user to try and circumvent security. Instead, if a user does not have access to the topic, the servers should act as if the topic does not exist.
To solve this some of the changes could include:
- The broker should not return a TOPIC_AUTHORIZATION(29) error for requests (metadata, produce, fetch, etc) that include a topic that the user does not have DESCRIBE access to.
- A user should not receive a TopicAuthorizationException when they do not have DESCRIBE access to a topic or the cluster.
- The client should not maintain and expose a list of unauthorized topics in org.apache.kafka.common.Cluster.
Other changes may be required that are not listed here. Further analysis is needed.
