Security

This article has examples in the following target languages:

• C

warning

The experimental security features described on this page are under development and not production ready. Users should not expect their federations will be secure if the auth target property is enabled.

By default, there is no secure authentication happening when a federate joins a federation, and data exchanged by federates is not encrypted. For targets that support it, the auth target property can be used to enable authentication between federates. Messages exchanged between federates after authentication are not encrypted, but this capability is planned for the future.

Authentication

For the C target, federated execution is able to apply security with authentication by using HMAC authentication between RTI and federates. To enable this, include the auth property in your target specification, as follows:

target C { auth: true };

The RTI build must include CMake options to enable simple HMAC-based authentication of federates. Add -DAUTH=ON option to the CMake command as shown below:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DAUTH=ON ../
make
sudo make install

If you would like to go back to non-AUTH mode, you would have to remove all contents of the build folder.