Simple Authentication Plug-In

Overview

The simple authentication plug-in provides the quickest way to enable authentication in a broker. With this approach, all of the user data is embedded in the broker configuration file. It is useful for testing purposes and for small-scale systems with relatively few users, but it does not scale well for large systems.

Broker configuration for simple authentication

Example 3.1 shows how to configure simple authentication by adding a simpleAuthenticationPlugin element to the list of plug-ins in the broker configuration.

Example 3.1. Simple Authentication Configuration

<beans>
  <broker ...>
    ...
    <plugins>
      		<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>
    </plugins>
    ...
  </broker>

</beans>

For each user, add an authenticationUser element as shown, setting the username, password, and groups attributes. In order to authenticate a user successfully, the username/password credentials received from a client must match the corresponding attributes in one of the authenticationUser elements. The groups attribute assigns a user to one or more groups (formatted as a comma-separated list). If authorization is enabled, the assigned groups are used to check whether a user has permission to invoke certain operations. If authorization is not enabled, the groups are ignored.