[CASSANDRA-17470] Default directory permissions for /var/lib/cassandra could be more restrictive

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Normal
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 5.0-alpha1, 5.0
• Component/s: Packaging
• Change Category: Operability
• Complexity: Normal
• Platform: All

Source Control Link

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/commit/39d372539f224eb1eaa3b6209610142abe74712c

Test and Documentation Plan

run CI

• Assignee: Brandon Williams
• Reporter: Sebastian Schulze

Authors

Brandon Williams

Reviewers

Berenguer Blasi

• Created: 22/Mar/22 15:01
• Updated: 12/Sep/23 13:02
• Resolved: 25/May/22 11:22

Description

I noticed that the default permissions for /var/lib/cassandra and everything below seem to be "world readable", e.g. "drwxr-xr-x 6 cassandra cassandra".

It might depend on the distribution / package used, but I can at least confirm this for the official Cassandra Debian packages as well as the Docker containers. Out of curiosity I compared it to Postgres and MySQL to see which defaults they would opt for and they are

drwxr-x--- 2 mysql mysql 4.0K Mar 22 10:00 mysql

and respectively

drwx------ 19 postgres postgres 4.0K Mar 22 10:01 data

which is way more appropriate in my option. (Here is a Gist with the script to compare them)

If there is no particular reason behind this, I would suggest that the default packages should have stricter ulimits that restricts access to the data directory to the cassandra user & group.

(See also this mailing list thread)