Anonymous access allows users to connect and subscribe to a public broadcast topic without any authentication process.

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This feature can be enabled on an account basis. To enable it on your account, contact Akamai support.

The feature can help broadcast data such as sports scores, stock prices, or news alerts. When connecting with the broker, subscribers don't need to provide a JWT token or certificate, username, or client ID details.

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  • Anonymous access works as it typically does when using Mosquitto or another standards-based broker.
  • ClientID needs to be empty, with Clean Session enabled. No password, user, token, or other credential is needed.
  • Anonymous access is available for both Websockets and "native" TLS connections.
  • Anonymous access is ringed on certain topics specified in the ACL. For example if an anonymous user connects and requests subscription to topics specified in the ACL, they are allowed to connect and subscribe.
  • Publishers still need to authenticate. Anonymous access works only for topic subscriptions.

Enabling anonymous access

To support the ACL rules by anonymous access:

  1. Go to > IOT SOLUTIONS > Publish-subscribe service.
  2. Click Manage for a name and jurisdiction you want to enable the ACL rules.
  3. Click Add ACL on the Configuration tab.
  4. Select the Anonymous access checkbox.
  5. Define the topic filter.
  6. Define publisher groups.

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The ROLE_ANONYMOUS group name is not available. Adding it results in a validation error message.

  1. Optional: Define the subscriber groups to allow authenticated users to access this topic. It doesn't affect the ACL rule when you select the Anonymous access checkbox.
  2. Click Save.
  3. On the Activation tab, click Activate new version.
    This activates the current configuration on the Configuration tab.