[KAFKA-6004] Enable custom authentication plugins to return error messages to clients

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Blocker
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.0.0
• Component/s: security
• Assignee: Rajini Sivaram
• Reporter: Rajini Sivaram
• Created: 02/Oct/17 20:58
• Updated: 04/Oct/17 17:46
• Resolved: 04/Oct/17 17:45

Description

KIP-152 enables authentication failures to be returned to clients to simplify diagnosis of security configuration issues. At the moment, a fixed message is returned to clients by SaslServerAuthenticator which says "Authentication failed due to invalid credentials with SASL mechanism $mechanism".

We have added an error message string to SaslAuthenticateResponse to return custom messages from the broker to clients. Custom SASL server implementations may want to return more specific error messages in some cases. We should allow this by returning error messages from specific exceptions (e.g. org.apache.kafka.common.errors.SaslAuthenticationException) in SaslAuthenticateResponse. It would be better not to return the error message from SaslException since it may contain information that we do not want to leak to clients.

We should do this for 1.0.0 to avoid compatibility issues later since third party implementors of SASL server may assume that SaslAuthenticationException is only logged on the server and not sent to clients, making it a security risk to update later.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #4015