[CASSANDRA-12525] When adding new nodes to a cluster which has authentication enabled, we end up losing cassandra user's current crendentials and they get reverted back to default cassandra/cassandra credentials

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 3.0.29, 3.11.15, 4.0.8, 4.1.1, 5.0-alpha1, 5.0
• Component/s: Cluster/Schema, Local/Config
• Severity: Normal
• Since Version: 3.0.0

Source Control Link

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/commit/8ecd7616fe5d3ce0cfe8f4621eda1905a9110db1

Test and Documentation Plan

clean CI and passed added test + manual test

• Assignee: German Eichberger
• Reporter: Atin Sood

Authors

German Eichberger

Reviewers

Brandon Williams, Stefan Miklosovic

• Created: 23/Aug/16 17:32
• Updated: 12/Sep/23 13:02
• Resolved: 18/Jan/23 14:29

Description

Made the following observation:

When adding new nodes to an existing C* cluster with authentication enabled we end up loosing password information about `cassandra` user.

Initial Setup

• Create a 5 node cluster with system_auth having RF=5 and NetworkTopologyStrategy
• Enable PasswordAuthenticator on this cluster and update the password for 'cassandra' user to say 'password' via the alter query
• Make sure you run nodetool repair on all the nodes

Test case

• Now go ahead and add 5 more nodes to this cluster.
• Run nodetool repair on all the 10 nodes now
• Decommission the original 5 nodes such that only the new 5 nodes are in the cluster now

• Run cqlsh and try to connect to this cluster using old user name and password, cassandra/password

I was unable to connect to the nodes with the original credentials and was only able to connect using the default cassandra/cassandra credentials

From the conversation over IIRC

`beobal: sood: that definitely shouldn't happen. The new nodes should only create the default superuser role if there are 0 roles currently defined (including that default one)`

Issue Links

• links to: Github PR