SSL X.509 certificate authentication

Note

This page is not applicable to ClickHouse Cloud. The feature documented here is not available in ClickHouse Cloud services. See the ClickHouse Cloud Compatibility guide for more information.

SSL 'strict' option enables mandatory certificate validation for the incoming connections. In this case, only connections with trusted certificates can be established. Connections with untrusted certificates will be rejected. Thus, certificate validation allows to uniquely authenticate an incoming connection. Common Name or subjectAltName extension field of the certificate is used to identify the connected user. This allows to associate multiple certificates with the same user. Additionally, reissuing and revoking of the certificates does not affect the ClickHouse configuration.

To enable SSL certificate authentication, a list of Common Name's or Subject Alt Name's for each ClickHouse user must be specified in the settings file users.xml :

Example

<clickhouse>
    <!- ... -->
    <users>
        <user_name_1>
            <ssl_certificates>
                <common_name>host.domain.com:example_user</common_name>
                <common_name>host.domain.com:example_user_dev</common_name>
                <!-- More names -->
            </ssl_certificates>
            <!-- Other settings -->
        </user_name_1>
        <user_name_2>
            <ssl_certificates>
                <subject_alt_name>DNS:host.domain.com</subject_alt_name>
                <!-- More names -->
            </ssl_certificates>
            <!-- Other settings -->
        </user_name_2>
    </users>
</clickhouse>

For the SSL chain of trust to work correctly, it is also important to make sure that the caConfig parameter is configured properly.