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Security

This chapter describes how security works with Apache ActiveMQ and how you can configure it. To disable security completely simply set the security-enabled property to false in the activemq-configuration.xml file.

For performance reasons security is cached and invalidated every so long. To change this period set the property security-invalidation-interval, which is in milliseconds. The default is 10000 ms.

Role based security for addresses

Apache ActiveMQ contains a flexible role-based security model for applying security to queues, based on their addresses.

As explained in Using Core, Apache ActiveMQ core consists mainly of sets of queues bound to addresses. A message is sent to an address and the server looks up the set of queues that are bound to that address, the server then routes the message to those set of queues.

Apache ActiveMQ allows sets of permissions to be defined against the queues based on their address. An exact match on the address can be used or a wildcard match can be used using the wildcard characters '#' and '*'.

Seven different permissions can be given to the set of queues which match the address. Those permissions are:

createDurableQueue. This permission allows the user to create a durable queue under matching addresses.
deleteDurableQueue. This permission allows the user to delete a durable queue under matching addresses.
createNonDurableQueue. This permission allows the user to create a non-durable queue under matching addresses.
deleteNonDurableQueue. This permission allows the user to delete a non-durable queue under matching addresses.
send. This permission allows the user to send a message to matching addresses.
consume. This permission allows the user to consume a message from a queue bound to matching addresses.
manage. This permission allows the user to invoke management operations by sending management messages to the management address.

For each permission, a list of roles who are granted that permission is specified. If the user has any of those roles, he/she will be granted that permission for that set of addresses.

Let's take a simple example, here's a security block from activemq-configuration.xml file:

<security-setting match="globalqueues.europe.#">
   <permission type="createDurableQueue" roles="admin"/>
   <permission type="deleteDurableQueue" roles="admin"/>
   <permission type="createNonDurableQueue" roles="admin, guest, europe-users"/>
   <permission type="deleteNonDurableQueue" roles="admin, guest, europe-users"/>
   <permission type="send" roles="admin, europe-users"/>
   <permission type="consume" roles="admin, europe-users"/>
</security-setting>

The '#' character signifies "any sequence of words". Words are delimited by the '.' character. For a full description of the wildcard syntax please see Understanding the HornetQ Wildcard Syntax. The above security block applies to any address that starts with the string "globalqueues.europe.":

Only users who have the admin role can create or delete durable queues bound to an address that starts with the string "globalqueues.europe."

Any users with the roles admin, guest, or europe-users can create or delete temporary queues bound to an address that starts with the string "globalqueues.europe."

Any users with the roles admin or europe-users can send messages to these addresses or consume messages from queues bound to an address that starts with the string "globalqueues.europe."

The mapping between a user and what roles they have is handled by the security manager. Apache ActiveMQ ships with a user manager that reads user credentials from a file on disk, and can also plug into JAAS or JBoss Application Server security.

For more information on configuring the security manager, please see 'Changing the Security Manager'.

There can be zero or more security-setting elements in each xml file. Where more than one match applies to a set of addresses the more specific match takes precedence.

Let's look at an example of that, here's another security-setting block:

<security-setting match="globalqueues.europe.orders.#">
   <permission type="send" roles="europe-users"/>
   <permission type="consume" roles="europe-users"/>
</security-setting>

In this security-setting block the match 'globalqueues.europe.orders.#' is more specific than the previous match 'globalqueues.europe.#'. So any addresses which match 'globalqueues.europe.orders.#' will take their security settings only from the latter security-setting block.

Note that settings are not inherited from the former block. All the settings will be taken from the more specific matching block, so for the address 'globalqueues.europe.orders.plastics' the only permissions that exist are send and consume for the role europe-users. The permissions createDurableQueue, deleteDurableQueue, createNonDurableQueue, deleteNonDurableQueue are not inherited from the other security-setting block.

By not inheriting permissions, it allows you to effectively deny permissions in more specific security-setting blocks by simply not specifying them. Otherwise it would not be possible to deny permissions in sub-groups of addresses.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Transport

When messaging clients are connected to servers, or servers are connected to other servers (e.g. via bridges) over an untrusted network then Apache ActiveMQ allows that traffic to be encrypted using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transport.

For more information on configuring the SSL transport, please see Configuring the Transport.

Basic user credentials

Apache ActiveMQ ships with a security manager implementation that reads user credentials, i.e. user names, passwords and role information from properties files on the classpath called activemq-users.properties and activemq-roles.properties. This is the default security manager.

If you wish to use this security manager, then users, passwords and roles can easily be added into these files.

To configure this manager then it needs to be added to the bootstrap.xml configuration. Lets take a look at what this might look like:

<basic-security>
  <users>file:${activemq.home}/config/non-clustered/activemq-users.properties</users>
  <roles>file:${activemq.home}/config/non-clustered/activemq-roles.properties</roles>
  <default-user>guest</default-user>
</basic-security>

The first 2 elements users and roles define what properties files should be used to load in the users and passwords.

The next thing to note is the element defaultuser. This defines what user will be assumed when the client does not specify a username/password when creating a session. In this case they will be the user guest. Multiple roles can be specified for a default user in the activemq-roles.properties.

Lets now take alook at the activemq-users.properties file, this is basically just a set of key value pairs that define the users and their password, like so:

bill=activemq
andrew=activemq1
frank=activemq2
sam=activemq3

The activemq-roles.properties defines what groups these users belong too where the key is the user and the value is a comma seperated list of the groups the user belongs to, like so:

bill=user
andrew=europe-user,user
frank=us-user,news-user,user
sam=news-user,user

Changing the username/password for clustering

In order for cluster connections to work correctly, each node in the cluster must make connections to the other nodes. The username/password they use for this should always be changed from the installation default to prevent a security risk.

Please see Management for instructions on how to do this.

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