[HBASE-12536] Reduce the effective scope of GLOBAL CREATE and ADMIN permission - ASF JIRA

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Details

Type: Bug
Status: Closed
Priority: Major
Resolution: Fixed
Affects Version/s: None
Fix Version/s: 0.94.24, 0.98.8, 0.99.2
Component/s: security
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This change removes implicit write access to the META and ACL tables for any user with GLOBAL CREATE or ADMIN privilege. Users with GLOBAL CREATE will not be able to elevate their privileges unexpectedly through direct access to the ACL table. A GLOBAL ADMIN will still correctly be allowed to grant themselves any desired privilege.

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This change removes implicit write access to the META and ACL tables for any user with GLOBAL CREATE or ADMIN privilege. Users with GLOBAL CREATE will not be able to elevate their privileges unexpectedly through direct access to the ACL table. A GLOBAL ADMIN will still correctly be allowed to grant themselves any desired privilege.

Description

The current implementation of the AccessController grants users with GLOBAL CREATE or ADMIN privilege implicit write access to the META and ACL tables, so when a new table is created new entries can be added to META and ACL appropriately in the pre and post handlers with the credentials supplied in the RPC context. Although any user with GLOBAL CREATE or ADMIN is already superuser-like in many respects, the implicit write privilege is an artifact of implementation that should be changed. We can remove the implicit write access. After doing so, users with GLOBAL CREATE will not be able to elevate their privileges unexpectedly through direct access to the ACL table. A GLOBAL ADMIN will be still correctly be allowed to grant themselves any desired privilege.

This issue was discovered and raised by devaraj on private@hbase as a potential security issue and was included in the 0.94.24 and 0.98.8 releases prior to the filing of this JIRA.

I've set the priority of this issue only at 'Major' since it only affects users with GLOBAL CREATE or ADMIN privilege. GLOBAL ADMIN is already a superuser, and GLOBAL CREATE likewise should already also be considered superuser-lite access and sparingly granted to trusted personnel.