[HBASE-13336] Consistent rules for security meta table protections

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Later
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Andrew Kyle Purtell
• Created: 26/Mar/15 01:55
• Updated: 24/Jun/22 17:38
• Resolved: 17/Jun/16 17:04

Description

The AccessController and VisibilityController do different things regarding protecting their meta tables. The AC allows schema changes and disable/enable if the user has permission. The VC unconditionally disallows all admin actions. Generally, bad things will happen if these meta tables are damaged, disabled, or dropped. The likely outcome is random frequent (or constant) server side op failures with nasty stack traces. On the other hand some things like column family and table attribute changes can have valid use cases. We should have consistent and sensible rules for protecting security meta tables.