Skip to content

Apache Kafka Unauthenticated Access Detection

kafka-unauthenticated is a high severity check in the messaging category, written in shell. Its source is templates/messaging/kafka/kafka-unauthenticated.sh in cert-x-gen-templates.

Detects Apache Kafka brokers accessible without authentication, exposing message streams and topics

Field Value
Id kafka-unauthenticated
Severity high
Language shell
Category messaging
Author CERT-X-GEN Security Team
Template version 1.0.0
Confidence 90
CVSS 8.6
Weakness CWE-306
Tags kafka, apache, messaging, unauthenticated, streaming, cwe-306
Target kind not recorded
Oracle not recorded

Declared in the header. cxg parses @references and then discards it, and nothing at scan time reads it, so this is the only place the links a template cites are surfaced.

To see what the copy on your machine says about itself, and to confirm it is installed at all:

Terminal window
cxg template info kafka-unauthenticated

The id it prints is the one to pass anywhere a template is selected. See cxg template for the rest of the subcommand, Scan a target for running a scan, and A match is not a finding for how to read what comes back.