How to Authenticate Kafka Using Kerberos (SASL), Spark, and Jupyter Notebook. We want to have permission to read and write Kafka topics. We need to obtain a ticket from Kerbero to access the topic. To get the ticket we have to provide a keytab — authentication file for each user. All these steps have to be done automatically because when we use commands to access Kafka there won’t be an opportunity to show keytab manually. To make Spark do this, we need to specify the right parameters and configurations.