How to get Consumers List

[pachico]

I am writing a plugin that needs to Authenticate SOAP requests so I cannot use the built-in Key Auth plugin.
To do this, I need to access the list of defined consumers (the same one I would use with the Key Auth plugin) so I can match password/token against it and see if the user is authenticated.
However, I cannot find any method in the SDK that would provide me with such list. I know this is available in Lua, though.

Can you point me in the right direction?

Thank you in advance