I'm a computer science graduate student in Indiana University, Bloomington and my research areas are in distributed computing. I'm also a committer to few Apache projects. I'm new to Hadoop, Hive and I would like to learn and contribute to these projects. It would be great if you can let me know the areas that I should be looking to get started.

Regards,
Supun Kamburugamuva

Supun,
I've tagged this for Google Summer of Code. Take a look at:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

So do you envision this as using the facilities provided by HADOOP-9331?

Andrew,
Yes if the code is available and provides the right API.

Yes if the code is available and provides the right API.

Owen O'Malley HADOOP-9331 proposes and provides an API, and HADOOP-9332 provides a codec implementing support for AES with optional hardware acceleration. This seems like an ideal use case for using both. Should you have any proposed improvements to the API please don’t hesitate to raise them on HADOOP-9331, where they will be promptly addressed. Likewise with the AES codec, please don’t hesitate to raise those on HADOOP-9332.

I am in the process of reworking the patch for HADOOP-9534 Credential Management Framework in order to support accessing keying material for this issue. Current thinking is that CMF can abstract the source of keys and be leveraged across a number of different crypto and password protection usecases in the Hadoop ecosystem. This is why it is being done in Hadoop rather than Hive. We will want to also align it's use with HADOOP-9331 - since 9331 will be leveraged in here as well as for the cryptoFS, etc.

Will provide a description of the DDL/metastore and column store changes that will be needed to support the column level encryption once I have it written up.

CMF will be used to access keying material for column level encryption.

I've started working on this. I'll post a patch this week.