When NiFi communicates with ZooKeeper, all communications, by default, are non-secure, and anyone who logs into ZooKeeper is able to view and manipulate all of the NiFi state that is stored in ZooKeeper. To prevent this, we can use Kerberos to manage the authentication. At this time, ZooKeeper does not provide support for encryption via SSL. Support for SSL in ZooKeeper is being actively developed and is expected to be available in the 3.5.x release version.

In order to secure the communications, we need to ensure that both the client and the server support the same configuration. Instructions for configuring the NiFi ZooKeeper client and embedded ZooKeeper server to use Kerberos are provided below.

If Kerberos is not already setup in your environment, you can find information on installing and setting up a Kerberos Server at https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Managing_Smart_Cards/Configuring_a_Kerberos_5_Server.html . This guide assumes that Kerberos already has been installed in the environment in which NiFi is running.

Note, the following procedures for kerberizing an Embedded ZooKeeper server in your NiFi Node and kerberizing a ZooKeeper NiFi client will require that Kerberos client libraries be installed. This is accomplished in Fedora-based Linux distributions via:

yum install krb5-workstation

Once this is complete, the /etc/krb5.conf will need to be configured appropriately for your organization's Kerberos environment.