Subscribe Authentication With ZeroMQ

Question

I am having a hard time understanding the ZeroMQ messaging system, so before I dive in, I wanted to see if anyone knew if what I want to do is even possible.

I want to setup a pubsub server with ZeroMQ that will publish certain streams of data and to subscribe to some of those streams, a user must authenticate to see if they have access to those streams. Everything I have seen has the subscribing taking place with the zmq.SUBSCRIBE, command.

Can this be modified to authenticate? Does it support it out of the box?

Answer 1

No, there is no such functionality out of the box. ZeroMQ operates on lower level and it is likely that auth-features will never be in the core.

Since pubsub is implemented on top of IP-multicast, I can suggest to write an auth-server that will control a network router and forbid all multicast traffic to the client by IP/port until this client will not be authorized. You're free to choose auth method in this case, of course.

If you can sacrifice ZeroMQ’s stability and performance to the development cost, just take ActiveMQ. It has authentication features.