LDAP Security Provider

This topic explains how to use your existing LDAP server for authentication/authorization in Management Center.

Hazelcast supports authentication and authorization against Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers. You can use Hazelcast Operator to configure Management Center to use an LDAP server. For more information about using LDAP in the Management Center, see the Management Center Documentation.

Setting Up the LDAP security provider

You can configure either LDAP or LDAP over TLS (or LDAPS). To set up:

  • LDAP — configure the securityProvider.ldap section in the Management Center CR

  • LDAP over TLS (or LDAPS)

    • Create a secret (the secretName) that contains the certificate and key. The operator will set up TrustStore and KeyStore automatically. If you do not create the secretName, a validation error will occur

    • Configure the securityProvider.ldap.tls section in the Management Center CR

Use the following fields to configure the LDAP security provider:

Field Description

url

URL of your LDAP server, including schema (ldap://) and port.

tls

Configuration for TLS:

  • secretName: The name of the secret that contains the certificate and key for LDAP over TLS (or LDAPS)

  • startTLS: Enable TLS encryption for LDAP connections to initiate a secure TLS connection over an initially unencrypted channel

credentialsSecretName

The name of the secret that contains username and password keys of a user that has admin privileges on the LDAP server. The username must be the distinguished name (DN) of the user. It is used to connect to the server when authenticating users.

userDN

DN to be used for searching users.

groupDN

DN to be used for searching groups.

adminGroups

Members of these groups and its nested groups have admin privileges on the Management Center.

userGroups

Members of these groups and its nested groups have read and write privileges on the Management Center.

readonlyUserGroups

Members of these groups and its nested groups have only read privilege on the Management Center.

metricsOnlyGroups

Members of these groups and its nested groups have the privilege to see only the metrics on the Management Center.

userSearchFilter

LDAP search filter expression to search for the users.

groupSearchFilter

LDAP search filter expression to search for the groups.

Example Management Center LDAP configuration

The following example shows how to create a Secret for the LDAP credentials:

$ kubectl create secret generic ldap-credentials --from-literal=username="cn=admin,dc=example,dc=org" --from-literal=password="adminpassword"
$ kubectl get secret ldap-credentials -o=yaml
apiVersion: v1
data:
  password: YWRtaW5wYXNzd29yZA==
  username: Y249YWRtaW4sZGM9ZXhhbXBsZSxkYz1vcmc=
kind: Secret
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2023-10-11T10:51:37Z"
  name: ldap-credentials
  namespace: default
  resourceVersion: "59391"
  uid: 299e5d42-4c72-4877-9a99-c6ffa3c68d07
type: Opaque

The following example shows how to create the secret for LDAP/TLS:

$ kubectl create secret tls mc-ldap-secret --cert=ca.crt --key=ca.keykgp

The following is an example configuration for the LDAP security provider:

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: ManagementCenter
metadata:
  name: managementcenter
spec:
  repository: "hazelcast/management-center"
  licenseKeySecretName: hazelcast-license-key
  securityProvider:
    ldap:
      credentialsSecretName: ldap-credentials
      groupDN: ou=groups,dc=example,dc=org
      groupSearchFilter: member={0}
      nestedGroupSearch: false
      url: ldap://ldap-server-url:1389
      userDN: ou=groups,dc=example,dc=org
      userGroups:
      - users
      metricsOnlyGroups:
      - metrics
      adminGroups:
      - admins
      readonlyUserGroups:
      - readers
      userSearchFilter: cn={0}

The following is an example configuration for the LDAP over TLS (or LDAPS) security provider:

apiVersion: hazelcast.com/v1alpha1
kind: ManagementCenter
metadata:
  name: managementcenter
spec:
  repository: 'hazelcast/management-center'
  licenseKeySecretName: hazelcast-license-key
  securityProvider:
    ldap:
      tls:
        secretName: mc-ldap-secret
        startTLS: true
      credentialsSecretName: ldap-credentials
      groupDN: ou=users,dc=example,dc=org
      groupSearchFilter: member={0}
      nestedGroupSearch: false
      url: ldap://34.118.236.200:1389
      userDN: ou=users,dc=example,dc=org
      userGroups:
        - readers
      metricsOnlyGroups:
        - readers
      adminGroups:
        - readers
      readonlyUserGroups:
        - readers
      userSearchFilter: cn={0}