Details
Major Description
Over the past 2-3 weeks, a couple of our clusters have failed to start due to a decryption failure. nifi-app.log displays "o.a.n.c.serialization.FlowFromDOMFactory There was a problem decrypting a sensitive flow configuration value. Check that the nifi.sensitive.props.key value in nifi.properties matches the value used to encrypt the flow.xml.gz file".
In both cases, none of the encryption key values in bootstrap.conf and nifi.properties have changed. The issue appears to be that one, or more, of the "enc{}" values in flow.xml.gz have become corrupted. The issue doesn't present itself until a node is restarted, at which point, NiFi continually fails to start due to the service being configured to auto-restart.
Ideally, rather than just failing to start, NiFi would still complete the startup & alert the user to any decryption issues, so that they can be fixed. Also, the log should indicate which configuration value(s) it failed to decrypt, to help narrow down where the issue is occurring.
In the interim, I've been removing the "enc{}" values from the flowfile, which allows NiFi to restart & give us the opportunity to manually re-enter the removed values. It's not ideal, but it does allow us to get our nodes back online.