[HBASE-5291] Add Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO authentication support to HBase web consoles

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.3.0, 2.0.0
• Component/s: master, regionserver, security

Release Note

HBase Web UIs can be secured from general public access using SPNEGO to require a valid Kerberos ticket.

Setting 'hbase.security.authentication.ui' to 'kerberos' in hbase-site.xml is a global switch to have all Web UIs allow only authenticated clients via Kerberos. 'hbase.security.authentication.spnego.kerberos.principal' and 'hbase.security.authentication.spnego.kerberos.keytab' are two other required properties in hbase-site.xml, the Kerberos principal and keytab to use for the server to use to log in. The primary in the Kerberos principal must be 'HTTP' as required by the SPNEGO mechanism, e.g. 'HTTP/[e-mail]'.

• Assignee: Josh Elser
• Reporter: Andrew Kyle Purtell
• Created: 27/Jan/12 00:13
• Updated: 12/Jun/22 20:11
• Resolved: 16/Jun/16 13:43

Description

Like HADOOP-7119, the same motivations:

Hadoop RPC already supports Kerberos authentication.

As does the HBase secure RPC engine.

Kerberos enables single sign-on.

Popular browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) have support for Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO.

Adding support for Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO to [HBase] web consoles would provide a unified authentication mechanism and single sign-on for web UI and RPC.

Also like HADOOP-7119, the same solution:

A servlet filter is configured in front of all Hadoop web consoles for authentication.

This filter verifies if the incoming request is already authenticated by the presence of a signed HTTP cookie. If the cookie is present, its signature is valid and its value didn't expire; then the request continues its way to the page invoked by the request. If the cookie is not present, it is invalid or it expired; then the request is delegated to an authenticator handler. The authenticator handler then is responsible for requesting/validating the user-agent for the user credentials. This may require one or more additional interactions between the authenticator handler and the user-agent (which will be multiple HTTP requests). Once the authenticator handler verifies the credentials and generates an authentication token, a signed cookie is returned to the user-agent for all subsequent invocations.

The authenticator handler is pluggable and 2 implementations are provided out of the box: pseudo/simple and kerberos.

1. The pseudo/simple authenticator handler is equivalent to the Hadoop pseudo/simple authentication. It trusts the value of the user.name query string parameter. The pseudo/simple authenticator handler supports an anonymous mode which accepts any request without requiring the user.name query string parameter to create the token. This is the default behavior, preserving the behavior of the HBase web consoles before this patch.

2. The kerberos authenticator handler implements the Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO implementation. This authenticator handler will generate a token only if a successful Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO interaction is performed between the user-agent and the authenticator. Browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer support Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO.

We can build on the support added to Hadoop via HADOOP-7119. Should just be a matter of wiring up the filter to our infoservers in a similar manner.

And from https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-5050?focusedCommentId=13171086&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13171086

Hadoop 0.23 onwards has a hadoop-auth artifact that provides SPNEGO/Kerberos authentication for webapps via a filter. You should consider using it. You don't have to move Hbase to 0.23 for that, just consume the hadoop-auth artifact, which has no dependencies on the rest of Hadoop 0.23 artifacts.

Issue Links

• is related to: HBASE-10336 Remove deprecated usage of Hadoop HttpServer in InfoServer
• is related to: KNOX-8 Support HBase via HBase/Stargate
• relates to: HBASE-5050 [rest] SPNEGO-based authentication
• relates to: IMPALA-5278 Add Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO authentication support to Impala web consoles
• relates to: SPARK-18452 Support History Server UI to use SPNEGO