Apache ActiveMQ -- Security

ActiveMQ 4.x provides pluggable security through various different providers.

The most common providers are

JAAS for authentication
a default authorization mechanism using a simple XML configuration file.

Please note that the underlying examples use recent SNAPSHOTS, they will NOT work under the ActiveMQ 4.1.1 stable release.

Authentication

The default JAAS plugin relies on the standard JAAS mechanism for authentication. Refer to the documentation for more detail.

Typically you configure JAAS using a config file like this one and set the java.security.auth.login.config system property to point to it. If no system property is specified then by default the ActiveMQ JAAS plugin will look for login.config on the classpath and use that.

Authentication Example

Here is an example login.config which then points to these files

Simple Authentication Plugin

If you have modest authentication requirements (or just want to quickly set up your testing environment) you can use SimpleAuthenticationPlugin. With this plugin you can define users and groups directly in the broker's XML configuration. Take a look at the following snippet for example:

<simpleAuthenticationPlugin>
	<users>
		<authenticationUser username="system" password="manager"
			groups="users,admins"/>
		<authenticationUser username="user" password="password"
			groups="users"/>
		<authenticationUser username="guest" password="password" groups="guests"/>
	</users>
</simpleAuthenticationPlugin>

Users and groups defined in this way can be later used with the appropriate authorization plugin.

Authorization

In ActiveMQ we use a number of operations which you can associate with user roles and either individual queues or topics or you can use wildcards to attach to hierarchies of topics and queues.

Operation	Description
read	You can browse and consume from the destination
write	You can send messages to the destination
admin	You can lazily create the destination if it does not yet exist. This allows you fine grained control over which new destinations can be dynamically created in what part of the queue/topic hierarchy

Queues/Topics can specified using the ActiveMQ wildcards syntax.

Authorization Example

The following example shows these 2 plugins in operation. Though note its very easy to write your own plugin.

<beans>
  <bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer"/>

  <broker useJmx="false" persistent="false" xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core" populateJMSXUserID="true">

    <plugins>
      <!--  use JAAS to authenticate using the login.config file on the classpath to configure JAAS -->
      <jaasAuthenticationPlugin configuration="activemq-domain" />

      <!--  lets configure a destination based authorization mechanism -->
      <authorizationPlugin>
        <map>
          <authorizationMap>
            <authorizationEntries>
              <authorizationEntry queue=">" read="admins" write="admins" admin="admins" />
              <authorizationEntry queue="USERS.>" read="users" write="users" admin="users" />
              <authorizationEntry queue="GUEST.>" read="guests" write="guests,users" admin="guests,users" />
              
              <authorizationEntry topic=">" read="admins" write="admins" admin="admins" />
              <authorizationEntry topic="USERS.>" read="users" write="users" admin="users" />
              <authorizationEntry topic="GUEST.>" read="guests" write="guests,users" admin="guests,users" />
              
              <authorizationEntry topic="ActiveMQ.Advisory.>" read="guests,users" write="guests,users" admin="guests,users"/>
            </authorizationEntries>
            
            <!-- let's assign roles to temporary destinations. comment this entry if we don't want any roles assigned to temp destinations  -->
            <tempDestinationAuthorizationEntry>  
              <tempDestinationAuthorizationEntry read="tempDestinationAdmins" write="tempDestinationAdmins" admin="tempDestinationAdmins"/>
           </tempDestinationAuthorizationEntry>               
          </authorizationMap>
        </map>
      </authorizationPlugin>
    </plugins>
  </broker>

</beans>

Message level Authorization

We have a configurable MessageAuthorizationPolicy to allow you to authorize each message using some content based authorization policy of your choosing. To enable this policy configure on the broker directly using the * messageAuthorizationPolicy* property or add it to the XML as follows

<broker>
  ..
  <messageAuthorizationPolicy>
    <bean class="com.acme.MyMessageAuthorizationPolicy" xmlns=""/>
  </messageAuthorizationPolicy>
  ..
</broker>

Implementing your own custom Security Plugin

All of the various security implementations are implemented as Interceptors so its very easy to add your own custom implementation. Its probably easier to start with one of the simple implementations though if you are using JAAS you could derive from the JAAS implementation.

Authentication

Authentication Example

Simple Authentication Plugin

Authorization

Authorization Example

Message level Authorization

Implementing your own custom Security Plugin

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