Overview

Credential Management service (CM) is intended for authentication of clients and endpointsendpoint.

CM supports:

  • Endpoint identification by endpoint token.
  • Client authentication by username/password combination.
  • Client authentication by client SSL certificate (using the issuer field and certificate serial number).

CM provides REST APIs to manage client and endpoint credentials and their states. CM maintains a credential state machine summarized in the following diagram.

CM credential state FSM

Credentials can be in one of the following states:

  • Inactive is the initial state for newly provisioned credential that has not been used to authenticate an endpoint or a client.
  • Active is the state credentials automatically move to after they were first used for endpoint or client authentication. Credentials can be suspended or revoked from the active state.
  • Suspended state is for temporarily disabled credentials. CM service will reject authentication requests with suspended credentials. Suspended credentials can be re-activated.
  • Revoked state is the terminal state for credentials that are no longer valid.

Alternatively, CM can be configured to work in trustful mode, in which it will accept any credentials with no need for provisioning in advance. Trustful CM mode is not recommended for production use.

CM persists all credentials-related data to MariaDB.

Interfaces

CM supports a number of interfaces to perform its functional role. The key supported interfaces are summarized in the following diagram.

CM interfaces diagram

For inter-service communication, Kaa services mainly use REST APIs and messaging protocols that run over NATS messaging system.

Authentication

CM supports Endpoint and Client Authentication Protocol for Communication services to validate credentials presented by endpoints and clients.

CM broadcasts endpoint token revocation events and client credential revocation events whenever, respectively, endpoint or client credentials transition from active to suspended or revoked state, or get deleted.

Credential management

CM provides a REST-based interface to manage endpoint and client credentials:

  • provisioning new credentials
  • transitioning credentials states
  • deleting credentials

EP unregistered events

CM listens to endpoint unregistered events to keep the list of valid endpoint credentials up to date. After receiving such events, CM deletes corresponding endpoint tokens from the database.