RabbitMQ OAuth2 Tutorial

These are the two goals of this guide:

Explore how applications and end users can authenticate with RabbitMQ server using OAuth 2.0 protocol rather than the traditional username/password, or others.
Explore what it takes to set up RabbitMQ Server with OAuth 2.0 authentication mechanism. Additionally you explore how to stand up (UAA) as an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server and all the operations to create OAuth clients, users and obtain their tokens.

If you want to quickly test how it works go straight to OAuth2 plugin in action section.

If you want to understand the details of how to configure RabbitMQ with Oauth2 go straight to Understand the environment section.

Table of Content

Prerequisites to follow this guide
OAuth2 plugin in action
- Set up UAA and RabbitMQ
Access Management UI using OAuth 2.0 tokens
- Service-Provider initiated logon
- Identity-Provider initiated logon
Access other protocols using OAuth 2.0 tokens
Use advanced OAuth 2.0 configuration
Use different OAuth 2.0 servers
Understand the environment
Understand a bit more about OAuth in the context of RabbitMQ

Prerequisites to follow this guide

Docker must be installed
Ruby must be installed
make

OAuth2 plugin in action

In order see the rabbitmq-auth-backend-oauth2 plugin in action you need an OAuth 2.0 Authorization server running and RabbitMQ server configured accordingly. To get up and running quickly, you are going to use UAA as Authorization Server. In the next section, you will see how to set up UAA and RabbitMQ. If you are new to OAuth 2.0, it is a good starting point. If you already know OAuth 2.0 and you want to learn how to configure RabbitMQ to talk to one of OAuth 2.0 server tested on this tutorial, you can jump straight to them. They are KeyCloak, https://auth0.com/ and Azure Active Directory in addition to UAA which you will use it in the next sections.

Set up UAA and RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ support two types of two signing keys used to digitally sign the JWT tokens. The two types are symmetrical and asymmetrical signing keys. The Authorization server is who digitally signs the JWT tokens and RabbitMQ has to be configured to validate any of the two types of digital signatures.

Given that asymmetrical keys are the most widely used option, you are going to focus on how to configure RabbitMQ with them.

Use Asymmetrical digital signing keys

Run the following 2 commands to get the environment ready to see Oauth2 plugin in action:

make start-uaa to get UAA server running
make start-rabbitmq to start RabbitMQ server

Access Management UI using OAuth 2.0 tokens

The Management UI can be configured with one of these two login modes:

Service-Provider initiated logon - This is the default and traditional OAuth 2.0 logon mode. The user comes to the Management UI and clicks on the button "Click here to logon" which initiates the logon. The logon process starts in RabbitMQ, the Service Provider.
Identity-Provider initiated logon - This is a logon mode meant for web portals. Users navigate to RabbitMQ with a token already obtained by the web portal on behalf of the user.

Supported OAuth 2.0 flow

Since RabbitMQ 3.10 the Management UI uses Authorization Code flow with PKCE*. Because RabbitMQ is a single-page web application, it cannot safely store credentials such as the client_id and client_secret required by RabbitMQ to authenticate with the Authorization Server in order to get a token for the end-user. Therefore, you should configure the RabbitMQ OAuth client in the Authorization Server so that it does not require client_secret. This type of OAuth clients/applications are known as public or non-confidential. In UAA they are configured as allowpublic: true.

Nevertheless, should your Authorization Server require a client_secret , you can configure it via management.oauth_client_secret.

Service-Provider initiated logon

The first time an end user arrives to the management ui (1), The user clicks on the button Click here to login and it is redirected (2) to UAA to authenticate. Once they successfully authenticate with UAA, the user is redirected back (3.) to RabbitMQ with a valid JWT token. RabbitMQ validates it and identifies the user and extracts its permissions from the JWT token.

    [ UAA ] <----2. auth----    [ RabbitMQ ]
            ----3. redirect-->  [  http    ]
                                  /|\
                                   |
                            1. rabbit_admin from a browser

At step 2, if this is the first time the user is accessing RabbitMQ resource, UAA will prompt the user to authorize RabbitMQ application as shown on the screenshot below.

You have previously configured UAA with 2 users:

rabbit_admin:rabbit_admin with full administrator access, i.e. administrator user-tag
and rabbitmq_management:rabbitmq_management with just management user-tag

Go to http://localhost:15672 and login using any of those two users. To try with a different user, just click on "logout" button and click again on Click here to log in and login with the other user.

This is a token issued by UAA for the rabbit_admin user thru the redirect flow you just saw above. It was signed with the symmetric key.

To configure RabbitMQ Management UI with OAuth 2.0 you need the following configuration entries:

 ...
 {rabbitmq_management, [
    {oauth_enabled, true},
    {oauth_client_id, "rabbit_client_code"},
    {oauth_provider_url, "http://localhost:8080"},      
    ...
  ]},

Identity-Provider initiated logon

Note: **This feature has not been released yet. It is only available in the development docker image pivotalrabbitmq/rabbitmq:oidc_idp_initiated_login-otp-max-bazel **

When RabbitMQ is offered as a service from a web portal, it is more convenient to navigate to RabbitMQ Management UI with a single click. The web portal is responsible for getting a token before taking the user to the RabbitMQ Management UI web page.

    [ Idp | WebPortal ] ----> 2. /login (access_token=<TOKEN>)----    [ RabbitMQ Cluster ]            
              /|\                                                        |       /|\
               |                                                         +--------+
      1. rabbit_admin from a browser                                   3. validate token

At step 1, rabbit_admin user navigates to the web portal and clicks on the hyperlink associated to a RabbitMQ cluster. At step 2, the web portal obtains a token and redirects the user to RabbitMQ's /login url with the token within the form field access_token. And at step 3, RabbitMQ validates the token in the http request and if it is valid, it redirects the user to the overview page.

By default, RabbitMQ Management UI is configured with service-provider initiated logon. You have to configure the Management plugin by adding just one entry to the configuration as shown below:

 ...
 {rabbitmq_management, [
    {oauth_enabled, true},
    {oauth_provider_url, "http://localhost:8080"},      
    {oauth_initiated_logon_type, idp_initiated},
    ...
  ]},

NOTE: When the user logs out, or its RabbitMQ session expired, or the token expired, the user is directed to the Management landing page which presents the user with a button labeled Click here to login. The user is never redirected automatically back to the url configured in oauth_provider_url. Only when the user clicks on the button, it is redirected to the configured in oauth_provider_url.

Access other protocols using OAuth 2.0 tokens

The following subsections demonstrate how to use access tokens with any messaging protocol and also to access the management rest api.

Monitoring agent accessing management REST api

You may have a monitoring agent such as Prometheus accessing RabbitMQ management REST api; or other type of agent checking the health of RabbitMQ. Because it is not an end user, or human, you refer to it as a service account. This service account could be our mgt_api_client client you created in UAA with the monitoring user tag.

This monitoring agent would use the client credentials or password grant flow to authenticate (1) with UAA and get back a JWT token (2.). Once it gets the token, it sends (3.) a HTTP request to the RabbitMQ management endpoint passing the JWT token.

    [ UAA ]                  [ RabbitMQ ]
      /|\                    [  http    ]
       |                          /|\
       |                       3.http://broker:15672/api/overview passing JWT token
       |                           |
       +-----1.auth---------  monitoring agent
       --------2.JWT-------->

The following command launches the browser with mgt_api_client client with a JWT token previously obtained from UAA:

make curl-uaa url=http://localhost:15672/api/overview client_id=mgt_api_client secret=mgt_api_client

AMQP Protocol

DL;DR: In this section, you are demonstrating how an application can connect to RabbitMQ presenting a JWT Token as a credential. The application you are going to use is PerfTest which is not an OAuth 2.0 aware application -see next use case for an OAuth 2.0 aware application.

You are launching PerfTest with a token that you have previously obtained from UAA. This is just to probe AMQP access with a JWT Token. Needless to say that the application should instead obtain the JWT Token prior to connecting to RabbitMQ and it should also be able to refresh it before reconnecting. RabbitMQ validates the token before accepting it. If the token has expired, RabbitMQ will reject the connection.

First of all, an application which wants to connect to RabbitMQ using OAuth2 must present a valid JWT token. To obtain the token, the application must first authenticate (1.) with UAA. In case of a successful authentication, it gets back a JWT token (2.) which uses it to connect (3.) to RabbitMQ.

    [ UAA ]                  [ RabbitMQ ]
      /|\                    [  amqp    ]
       |                          /|\
       |                       3.connect passing JWT
       |                           |
       +-----1.auth---------  amqp application
       --------2.JWT-------->

You have previously configured UAA with these 2 OAuth clients:

consumer
and producer

An application requires an oauth client in order to get an JWT token. Applications use the Oauth client grant flow to obtain a JWT token

This the token issued by UAA for the consumer OAuth client.

To launch the consumer application invoke the following command:

make start-perftest-consumer

To check the logs : docker logs consumer -f

To launch the producer application invoke the following command:

make start-perftest-producer

To check the logs : docker logs producer -f

To stop all the applications call the following command:

make stop-all-apps

JMS protocol

In this use case you are demonstrating a basic JMS application which reads, via an environment variable (TOKEN), the JWT token that will use as password when authenticating with RabbitMQ.

It is VERY IMPORTANT to grant the required permission to the exchange jms.durable.queues.

Applications which send JMS messages require of these permissions:

rabbitmq.configure:*/jms.durable.queues
rabbitmq.write:*/jms.durable.queues
rabbitmq.read:*/jms.durable.queues

Those permissions grant access on any vhost.

Before testing a publisher and a subscriber application you need to build a local image for the basic jms application by invoking this command:

make build-jms-client

To test a JMS application sending a message and authenticating via OAuth run this command:

make start-jms-publisher

It sends a message to a queue called q-test-queue

Applications which subscribe to a JMS queue require of these permissions:

rabbitmq.write:*/jms.durable.queues

Those permissions grant access on any vhost.

To test a JMS application subscribing to a queue and authenticating via OAuth run this command:

make start-jms-subscriber

It subscribes to a queue called q-test-queue

MQTT protocol

This scenario explores the use case where you authenticate with a JWT token to RabbitMQ MQTT port.

Note: RabbitMQ is already configured with rabbitmq_mqtt plugin.

This is no different than using AMQP or JMS protocols, all that matters is to pass an empty username and a JWT token as password. However, what it is really different is how you encode the permissions. In this use case you are going to proceed as you did it in the previous use case where you handcrafted the JWT token rather than requesting it to UAA. Here is the the scopes required to publish a message to a mqtt topic (scopes-for-mqtt.json)

{
  "scope": [
    "rabbitmq.write:*/*/*",
    "rabbitmq.configure:*/*/*",
    "rabbitmq.read:*/*/*"

  ],
  "extra_scope": "rabbitmq.tag:management",
  "aud": [
    "rabbitmq"
  ]
}

rabbitmq.write:*/*/* means allow write operation on a any vhost, on any exchange and any topic. In fact, it is any "routing-key" because that is translated to a topic/queue.

You are going to publish a mqtt message by running the following command. If you have not run any of the previous use cases, you need to launch rabbitmq first like this make start-rabbitmq.

make start-mqtt-publish TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token scopes-for-mqtt.json legacy-token-key private.pem public.pem)

IMPORTANT: If you try to access the management ui and authenticate with UAA using rabbit_admin you wont be able to do bind a queue with routing_key test to the amq.topic exchange because that user in UAA does not have the required permissions. In our handcrafted token, you have granted ourselves the right permissions/scopes.

Use advanced OAuth 2.0 configuration

In this section, you are going to explore various OAuth 2.0 configurations you can enable in RabbitMQ.

Use custom scope field

There are some Authorization servers which cannot include RabbitMQ scopes into the standard JWT scope field. Instead, they can include RabbitMQ scopes in a custom JWT scope of their choice.

Since RabbitMQ 3.9, it is possible to configure RabbitMQ with a different field to look for scopes as shown below:

[
  {rabbitmq_auth_backend_oauth2, [
    ...
    {extra_scopes_source, <<"extra_scope">>},
    ...
    ]}
  ]},
].

To test this feature you are going to build a token, sign it and use it to hit one of the RabbitMQ management endpoints. The command below allows us to hit any management endpoint, in this case it is the overview, with a token.

make curl-with-token URL=http://localhost:15672/api/overview TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token scope-and-extra-scope.json legacy-token-key private.pem public.pem)

You use the python script bin/jwt_token.py to build the minimal JWT token possible that RabbitMQ is able to validate which is:

{
  "scope": [

  ],
  "extra_scope": [
    "rabbitmq.tag:management"
  ],
  "aud": [
    "rabbitmq"
  ]
}

Use multiple asymmetrical signing keys

This scenario explores the use case where JWT tokens may be signed by different asymmetrical signing keys.

There are 2 ways to configure RabbitMQ with multiple signing keys:

You can either statically configure them via rabbitmq.conf as shown in the plugin documentation page.
Or you can do it dynamically, i.e, add signing keys while RabbitMQ is running and without having to restart it. This alternative is explained in more detail in the section About rotating JWT signing key. However, you are going to demonstrate it here as well.

First you add a second signing key called legacy-token-2-key whose public key is conf/public-2.pem:

docker exec -it rabbitmq rabbitmqctl add_uaa_key legacy-token-2-key --pem-file=/conf/public-2.pem
Adding UAA signing key "legacy-token-2-key" filename: "/conf/public-2.pem"

And then you issue a token using the corresponding private key and use it to access the management endpoint /api/overview.

make curl-with-token URL=http://localhost:15672/api/overview TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token scope-and-extra-scope.json legacy-token-2-key private-2.pem public-2.pem)

jwt_token searches for private and public key files under conf folder and jwt files under jwts.

Use custom scopes

In this use case you are going to demonstrate how to configure RabbitMQ to handle custom scopes. But what are custom scopes? They are any scope whose format is not compliant with RabbitMQ format. For instance, api://rabbitmq:Read.All is one of the custom scopes you will use in this use case.

How to configure RabbitMQ with custom scope mapping

Since RabbitMQ 3.10.0-rc.6, you are able to map a custom scope to one or many RabbitMQ scopes. See below a sample RabbitMQ configuration where you map api://rabbitmq:Read.All custom scope to rabbitmq.read:*/* RabbitMQ scope.

{rabbitmq_auth_backend_oauth2, [
 ...,
	{scope_aliases, #{
		<<"api://rabbitmq:Read.All">>      => [<<"rabbitmq.read:*/*">>],
	  ...
	},
	...
]}

Additionally, you can map a custom scope to many RabbitMQ scopes. For instance below you are mapping the role api://rabbitmq:producer to 3 RabbitMQ scopes which grants read, write and configure access on any resource and on any vhost:

{rabbitmq_auth_backend_oauth2, [
 ...,

	{scope_aliases, #{
		<<"api://rabbitmq:producer">> => [
			<<"rabbitmq.read:*/*">>,
			<<"rabbitmq.write:*/*">>,
			<<"rabbitmq.configure:*/*">>
		]
	}},
	...
]}

How custom scopes are carried in JWT tokens

If you do not configure RabbitMQ OAuth2 plugin with extra_scopes_source, RabbitMQ expects the scope token's field to carry custom scopes. For instance, below you have a sample JWT token where the custom scopes are in the scope field :

{
  "sub": "producer",
  "scope": [
    "api://rabbitmq:producer",
    "api://rabbitmq:Administrator"
  ],
  "aud": [
    "rabbitmq"
  ]
}

Now, let's say you do configure RabbitMQ OAuth2 plugin with extra_scopes_source as shown below:

  {rabbitmq_auth_backend_oauth2, [
    {resource_server_id, <<"rabbitmq">>},
    {extra_scopes_source, <<"roles">>},
    ...

With this configuration, RabbitMQ expects custom scopes in the field roles and the scope field is ignored.

{
  "sub": "rabbitmq-client-code",
  "roles": "api://rabbitmq:Administrator.All",
  "aud": [
    "rabbitmq"
  ]
}

UAA configuration

To demonstrate this new capability you have configured UAA with two Oauth2 clients. One called producer_with_roles with the custom scope api://rabbitmq:producer and consumer_with_roles with api://rabbitmq:Read:All,api://rabbitmq:Configure:All,api://rabbitmq:Write:All.

you are granting configure and write permissions to the consumer because you have configured perf-test to declare resources regardless whether it is a producer or consumer application.

These two uaac commands declare the two oauth2 clients above. You are adding an extra scope called rabbitmq.* so that UAA populates the JWT claim aud with the value rabbitmq. RabbitMQ expects aud to match the value you configure RabbitMQ with in the resource_server_id field.

uaac client add producer_with_roles --name producer_with_roles \
    --authorities "rabbitmq.*,api://rabbitmq:producer,api://rabbitmq:Administrator" \
    --authorized_grant_types client_credentials \
    --secret producer_with_roles_secret
uaac client add consumer_with_roles --name consumer_with_roles \
    --authorities "rabbitmq.* api://rabbitmq:read:All" \
    --authorized_grant_types client_credentials \
    --secret consumer_with_roles_secret

RabbitMQ configuration

There are two configuration files ready to use to launch RabbitMQ:

conf/uaa/rabbitmq-scope-aliases.config - which configures scope mappings.
conf/uaa/rabbitmq-scope-aliases-and-extra-scope.config - which configures extra_scopes_source and scope mappings.

Demo 1 - Launch RabbitMQ with custom scopes in scope field

To launch RabbitMq with scope mappings and with custom scopes in the scope field you run the following command:

CONFIG=rabbitmq-scope-aliases.config make start-rabbitmq

This command will stop RabbitMQ if it is already running

Launch a producer application with the client producer_with_roles

make start-perftest-producer PRODUCER=producer_with_roles

To check the logs : docker logs producer_with_roles -f

Launch a consumer application with the client consumer_with_roles

make start-perftest-consumer CONSUMER=consumer_with_roles

To check the logs : docker logs consumer_with_roles -f

Access management api with the client producer_with_roles

make curl url=http://localhost:15672/api/overview client_id=producer_with_roles secret=producer_with_roles_secret

To stop the perf-test applications run :

make stop-perftest-producer PRODUCER=producer_with_roles
make stop-perftest-consumer CONSUMER=consumer_with_roles

Demo 2 - Launch RabbitMQ with custom scopes in extra scope field

To launch RabbitMq with scope mappings and with custom scopes in the extra_scope you run the following command:

CONFIG=rabbitmq-scope-aliases-and-extra-scope.config make start-rabbitmq

This command will stop RabbitMQ if it is already running

You cannot use UAA to issue the tokens because you cannot configure UAA to use a custom field for scopes. Instead you are going to issue the token ourselves with the command bin/jwt_token.

Launch a producer application with the token producer-role-in-scope.json:

make start-perftest-producer-with-token PRODUCER=producer_with_roles TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token producer-role-in-extra-scope.json legacy-token-key private.pem public.pem)

To check the logs : docker logs producer_with_roles -f

Launch a consumer application with the token consumer-roles-in-extra-scope.json:

make start-perftest-consumer-with-token CONSUMER=consumer_with_roles TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token consumer-roles-in-extra-scope.json legacy-token-key private.pem public.pem)

Access management api with the token producer-roles-in-extra-scope.json

make curl-with-token URL="http://localhost:15672/api/overview" TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token producer-roles-in-extra-scope.json legacy-token-key private.pem public.pem)

To stop the perf-test applications run :

make stop-perftest-producer PRODUCER=producer_with_roles
make stop-perftest-consumer CONSUMER=consumer_with_roles

Preferred username claims

RabbitMQ needs to figure out the username associated to the token so that it can display it in the management ui. By default, RabbitMQ will first look for the sub claim and if it is not found it uses the client_id.

Most authorization servers return the user's GUID in the sub claim rather than the actual user's username or email address, anything the user can relate to. When the sub claim does not carry a user-friendly username, you can configure one or several claims to extract the username from the token.

Given this configuration;

  ...
  {rabbitmq_auth_backend_oauth2, [
    {resource_server_id, <<"rabbitmq">>},
    {preferred_username_claims, [<<"user_name">>,<<"email">>]},
  ...

RabbitMQ would first look for the user_name claim and if it is not found it looks for email. Else it uses its default lookup mechanism which first looks for sub and then client_id.

Use Rich Authorization Request Tokens

The Rich Authorization Request extension provides a way for OAuth clients to request fine-grained permissions during an authorization request. It moves away from the concept of Scopes and instead define a rich permission model.

RabbitMQ supports JWT tokens compliant with this specification. Here is a sample JWT token where you have stripped out all the other attributes and left only the relevant ones for this specification:

{
  "authorization_details": [
    { "type" : "rabbitmq",  
      "locations": ["cluster:finance/vhost:primary-*"],
      "actions": [ "read", "write", "configure"  ]
    },
    { "type" : "rabbitmq",
      "locations": ["cluster:finance", "cluster:inventory" ],
      "actions": ["administrator" ]
    }
  ]
}

Get the environment ready

To demonstrate this new capability you have to deploy RabbitMQ with the appropriate configuration file under conf/uaa/rabbitmq-for-rar-tokens.config.

export CONFIG=rabbitmq-for-rar-tokens.config
make start-rabbitmq

NOTE: You do not need to run any OAuth2 server like UAA. This is because you are creating a token and signing it using the same private-public key pair RabbitMQ is configured with.

Use a Rich Authorization Token to access the management rest api

You are going use this token jwts/rar-token.json to access an endpoint of the management rest api.

make curl-with-token URL=http://localhost:15672/api/overview TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token rar-token.json legacy-token-key private.pem public.pem)

You are using curl to go to the URL using a TOKEN which you have built using the command bin/jwt_token which takes the JWT payload, the name of the signing key and the private and public certificates to sign the token

Use a Rich Authorization Token to access AMQP protocol

This time, you are going to use the same token you used in the previous section to access the AMQP protocol via the PerfTest tool which acts as a AMQP producer application:

make start-perftest-producer-with-token PRODUCER=producer_with_roles TOKEN=$(bin/jwt_token rar-token.json legacy-token-key private.pem public.pem)

The command above launches the application in the background, you can check the logs by running this command:

docker logs producer_with_roles -f

For more information on this new capability check out the plugin's documentation.

Understand the environment

RabbitMQ server

You need to launch RabbitMQ with the following prerequisites:

plugin enabled. See conf/enabled_plugins

plugin configured with the signing key used by UAA. For more details check out this section

  {rabbitmq_auth_backend_oauth2, [
    {resource_server_id, <<"rabbitmq">>}
    {key_config, [
      {default_key, <<"legacy-token-key">>},
      {signing_keys, #{
        <<"legacy-token-key">> => {map, #{<<"kty">> => <<"MAC">>,
                                  <<"alg">> => <<"HS256">>,
                                  <<"use">> => <<"sig">>,
                                  <<"value">> => <<"tokenKey">>}}
      }}
    ]}
  ]},

rabbit configured with Oauth2 auth-backend and internal auth-backend

[
  % Enable auth backend
  {rabbit, [
     {auth_backends, [rabbit_auth_backend_oauth2, rabbit_auth_backend_internal]}
  ]},
].

rabbit management plugin configured with UAA. This includes the auto client (rabbit_client) RabbitMQ uses to authenticate users with UAA and the URL of UAA (http://localhost:8080/uaa)

[
  {rabbitmq_management, [
		  {enable_uaa, true},
      {oauth_enabled, true},
      {oauth_client_id, "rabbit_client_code"},
      {oauth_provider_url, "http://uaa:8080/uaa"}
  ]},
].

UAA server

Standalone OAuth2 server (https://github.com/cloudfoundry/uaa). Its primary role is to serve as an OAuth2 provider, issuing tokens for client applications. It can also authenticate users with their Cloud Foundry credentials. It has endpoints for managing user accounts and for registering OAuth2 clients, as well as various other management functions

IMPORTANT:

UAA can run with an external database. But for the purposes of this exploration, the internal database is sufficient

To check that UAA is running fine:

curl -k  -H 'Accept: application/json' http://localhost:8080/uaa/info | jq .

Currently RabbitMQ Management plugin does not support latest version of UAA. That is why in order to run the use cases you use the image built from the folder uaa-4.24. This has to do with the javascript library that comes with the management plugin.

UAA client

In order to interact with UAA server there is a convenient command-line application called uaac. To install it and get it ready run the following command:

make install-uaac

In order to operate with uaa you need to "authenticate". There is an OAuth client preconfigured with the following credentials admin:adminsecret. This user is configured under <uaa_repo>/uaa/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/spring/oauth-clients.xml. The above command takes care of this.

Clients, Users & Permissions in UAA

When you run make start-uaa you start up UAA with a uaa.yaml configured with all the clients, users and permissions required by this tutorial. For instance:

rabbit_client: client who is going to be used by RabbitMQ server to authenticate management users coming to the management ui.
rabbit_admin: user who is going to be the full administrator user with full access
rabbit_monitor: user who is going to be the monitoring user with just the monitoring user tag
consumer: client who is going to be the RabbitMQ User for the consumer application
producer: client who is going to be the RabbitMQ User for the producer application

Understand a bit more about OAuth in the context of RabbitMQ

About Users and Clients

First of all, you need to clarify the distinction between users and clients.

A user is often represented as a live person. This is typically the user who wants to access the RabbitMQ Management UI/API.
A client (a.k.a. service account) is an application that acts on behalf of a user or act on its own. This is typically an AMQP application.

About Permissions

Users and clients will both need to get granted permissions. In OAuth 2.0, permissions/roles are named scopes. They are free form strings. When a RabbitMQ user connects to RabbitMQ, it must provide a JWT token with those scopes as a password (and empty username). And RabbitMQ determines from those scopes what permissions it has.

The scope format recognized by RabbitMQ is as follows

<resource_server_id>.<permission>:<vhost_pattern>/<name_pattern>[/<routing_key_pattern>]

where:

<resource_server_id> is a prefix used for scopes in UAA to avoid scope collisions (or unintended overlap)
<permission> is an access permission (configure, read, write, tag)
<vhost_pattern> is a wildcard pattern for vhosts token has access to
<name_pattern> is a wildcard pattern for resource name
<routing_key_pattern> is an optional wildcard pattern for routing key in topic authorization

For more information, check the plugin and rabbitmq permissions docs.

Sample scope(s):

rabbitmq.read:*/* grants read permission on any vhost and on any resource
rabbitmq.write:uaa_vhost/x-* grants write permissions on uaa_vhost on any resource that starts with x-
rabbitmq.tag:monitoring grants monitoring user tag

Be aware that you have used rabbitmq resource_server_id in the sample scopes. RabbitMQ must be configured with this same resource_server_id. Check out conf/symmetric_keys/rabbitmq.config

About signing key required to configure RabbitMQ

This is the signing key UAA uses to sign the tokens. RabbitMQ is already configured with this key.

uaac target  http://localhost:8080
uaac signing key -c admin -s adminsecret

It prints out:

kty: MAC
alg: HS256
value: tokenKey
use: sig
kid: legacy-token-key

You could retrieve it via the UAA REST API as follows: curl 'http://localhost:8080/uaa/token_key' -i -H 'Accept: application/json' -u admin:adminsecret

About rotating JWT signing key

When UAA -or any other OAuth2 server- rotates the signing key you need to reconfigure RabbitMQ with that key. You don't need to edit the configuration and restart RabbitMQ.

Instead, thru the rabbitmqctl add_uaa_key command you can add more keys. This is more or less what could happen.

UAA starts up with a signing key called "key-1"
You configure RabbitMQ with the signing key "key-1" following the procedure explained in the previous section
RabbitMQ starts
An application obtains a token from UAA signed with that "key-1" signing key and connects to RabbitMQ using the token
RabbitMQ can validate it because it has the signing key
UAA rotates the signing key. It has a new key "key-2"
An application obtains a new token from UAA. This time it is signed using "key-2". The application connect to RabbitMQ using the new token
RabbitMQ fails to validate it because it does not have "key-2" signing key. Later on you will see how RabbitMQ finds out the signing key name for the JWT
You add the new signing key via the rabbitmqctl command
This time RabbitMQ can validate tokens signed with "key-2"

One way to keep RabbitMQ up-to-date is to periodically check with token keys endpoint (using the E-tag header). When the list of active tokens key has changed, you retrieve them and add them using rabbitmqctl add_uaa_key.

You are probably missing the ability to remove deprecated/obsolete signing keys. The function is there so you could potentially invoke it via rabbitmqctl eval command.

Understanding Access tokens and how RabbitMQ uses it

First of all, lets quickly go thru how RabbitMQ uses the OAuth Access Tokens; how RabbitMQ users/clients pass the token; whats inside the token and what information in the token is relevant for RabbitMQ and how it uses it.

How RabbitMQ gets the token

RabbitMQ expects a JWS in the password field.

For end users, the best way to come to the management ui is by the following url, replacing <token> by the actual JWT.

http://localhost:15672/#/login/?&access_token=<token>

This is how make open command is able to open the browser and login the user using a JWT.

make open username=rabbit_admin password=rabbit_admin

RabbitMQ expects a signed token

RabbitMQ expects a JWS, i.e. signed JWT. It consists of 3 parts: a header which describes the signing algorithm and the signing key identifier used to sign the JWT. A body with the actual token and a signature.

This is a example of the header of a JWT issued by UAA:

By the way, the command uaac token decode does not print the header only the actual token. One simple way to get this information is going to this url https://jwt.io/.

{
  "alg": "HS256",
  "jku": "https://localhost:8080/uaa/token_keys",
  "kid": "legacy-token-key",
  "typ": "JWT"
}