NiFi Configuration Best Practices
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Security Configuration

NiFi provides several different configuration options for security purposes. The most important properties are those under the "security properties" heading in the nifi.properties file. In order to run securely, the following properties must be set:

Property Name Description

nifi.security.needClientAuth

Set to true to specify that connecting clients must authenticate themselves. This property is used by the NiFi cluster protocol to indicate that nodes in the cluster will be authenticated and must have certificates that are trusted by the Truststores.

nifi.security.keystore

Filename of the Keystore that contains the server's private key.

nifi.security.keystoreType

The type of Keystore. Must be either PKCS12 or JKS. JKS is the preferred type, PKCS12 files will be loaded with BouncyCastle provider.

nifi.security.keystorePasswd

The password for the Keystore.

nifi.security.keyPasswd

The password for the certificate in the Keystore. If not set, the value of nifi.security.keystorePasswd will be used.

nifi.security.truststore

Filename of the Truststore that will be used to authorize those connecting to NiFi. A secured instance with no Truststore will refuse all incoming connections.

nifi.security.truststoreType

The type of the Truststore. Must be either PKCS12 or JKS. JKS is the preferred type, PKCS12 files will be loaded with BouncyCastle provider.

nifi.security.truststorePasswd

The password for the Truststore.

Once the above properties have been configured, we can enable the User Interface to be accessed over HTTPS instead of HTTP. This is accomplished by setting the nifi.web.https.host and nifi.web.https.port properties. The nifi.web.https.host property indicates which hostname the server should run on. If it is desired that the HTTPS interface be accessible from all network interfaces, a value of 0.0.0.0 should be used. To allow admins to configure the application to run only on specific network interfaces, nifi.web.http.network.interface* or nifi.web.https.network.interface* properties can be specified.

Note
Note
It is important when enabling HTTPS that the nifi.web.http.port property be unset. NiFi only supports running on HTTP or HTTPS, not both simultaneously.

Similar to nifi.security.needClientAuth, the web server can be configured to require certificate based client authentication for users accessing the User Interface. Either of these options will configure the web server to WANT certificate based client authentication. This will allow it to support users with certificates and those without that may be logging in with their credentials or those accessing anonymously. If username/password authentication and anonymous access are not configured, the web server will REQUIRE certificate based client authentication.

Now that the User Interface has been secured, we can easily secure Site-to-Site connections and inner-cluster communications, as well. This is accomplished by setting the nifi.remote.input.secure and nifi.cluster.protocol.is.secure properties, respectively, to true.