[HIVE-15076] Improve scalability of LDAP authentication provider group filter

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.1.0
• Fix Version/s: 2.3.0
• Component/s: Authentication
• Assignee: Illya Yalovyy
• Reporter: Illya Yalovyy
• Created: 26/Oct/16 20:17
• Updated: 21/Jul/17 18:26
• Resolved: 09/Jan/17 20:40

Description

Current implementation uses following algorithm:

1. For a given user find all groups that user is a member of. (A list of LDAP groups is constructed as a result of that request)
2. Match this list of groups with provided group filter.

Time/Memory complexity of this approach is O(N) on client side, where N – is a number of groups the user has membership in. On a large directory (800+ groups per user) we can observe up to 2x performance degradation and failures because of size of LDAP response (LDAP: error code 4 - Sizelimit Exceeded).

Some Directory Services (Microsoft Active Directory for instance) provide a virtual attribute for User Object that contains a list of groups that user belongs to. This attribute can be used to quickly determine whether this user passes or fails the group filter.

Issue Links

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