Client Security

Versions of Riak 2.0 and later come equipped with a security subsystem that enables you to choose

• which Riak users/clients are authorized to perform a wide variety of Riak operations, and
• how those users/clients are required to authenticate themselves.

The following four authentication mechanisms, aka security sources are available:

• Trust-based authentication enables you to specify trusted CIDRs from which all clients will be authenticated by default
• Password-based authentication requires that clients provide a username and password
• Certificate-based authentication requires that clients
• Pluggable authentication module (PAM)-based authentication requires clients to authenticate using the PAM service specified using the [riak-admin security](/riak/kv/2.1.3/using/security/managing-sources/#managing-sources) command line interface

Riak’s approach to security is highly flexible. If you choose to use Riak’s security feature, you do not need to require that all clients authenticate via the same means. Instead, you can specify authentication sources on a client-by-client, i.e. user-by-user, basis. This means that you can require clients performing, say, MapReduce operations to use certificate auth, while clients performing K/V Operations have to use username and password. The approach that you adopt will depend on your security needs.

This document provides a general overview of how that works. For managing security in Riak itself, see the following documents:

• Authentication and Authorization
• Managing Security Sources

We also provide client-library-specific guides for the following officially supported clients:

• Java
• Ruby
• PHP
• Python
• Erlang

Certificates, Keys, and Authorities

If Riak security is enabled, all client operations, regardless of the security source you choose for those clients, must be over a secure SSL connection. If you are using a self-generated Certificate Authority (CA), Riak and connecting clients will need to share that CA.

To use certificate-based auth, you will need to create a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based on x.509 certificates. The central foundation of your PKI should be a Certificate Authority (CA), created inside of a secure environment, that can be used to sign certificates. In addition to a CA, your client will need to have access to a private key shared only by the client and Riak as well as a CA-generated certificate.

To prevent so-called Man-in-the-Middle attacks, private keys should never be shared beyond Riak and connecting clients.

HTTP not supported

Certificate-based authentication is available only through Riak’s Protocol Buffers interface. It is not available through the HTTP API.

Default Names

In Riak’s configuration files, the default certificate file names are as follows:

These filenames will be used in the client-library-specific tutorials.