Secure Client Access to HBase Newer releases of HBase (>= 0.92) support optional SASL authentication of clients. This describes how to set up HBase and HBase clients for connection to secure HBase resources.
Prerequisites
HBase must have been built using the new maven profile for secure Hadoop/HBase: -P security. Secure Hadoop dependent classes are separated under a pseudo-module in the security/ directory and are only included if built with the secure Hadoop profile. You need to have a working Kerberos KDC. A HBase configured for secure client access is expected to be running on top of a secured HDFS cluster. HBase must be able to authenticate to HDFS services. HBase needs Kerberos credentials to interact with the Kerberos-enabled HDFS daemons. Authenticating a service should be done using a keytab file. The procedure for creating keytabs for HBase service is the same as for creating keytabs for Hadoop. Those steps are omitted here. Copy the resulting keytab files to wherever HBase Master and RegionServer processes are deployed and make them readable only to the user account under which the HBase daemons will run. A Kerberos principal has three parts, with the form username/fully.qualified.domain.name@YOUR-REALM.COM. We recommend using hbase as the username portion. The following is an example of the configuration properties for Kerberos operation that must be added to the hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster. Required for even the most basic interactions with a secure Hadoop configuration, independent of HBase security. hbase.regionserver.kerberos.principal hbase/_HOST@YOUR-REALM.COM hbase.regionserver.keytab.file /etc/hbase/conf/keytab.krb5 hbase.master.kerberos.principal hbase/_HOST@YOUR-REALM.COM hbase.master.keytab.file /etc/hbase/conf/keytab.krb5 ]]> Each HBase client user should also be given a Kerberos principal. This principal should have a password assigned to it (as opposed to a keytab file). The client principal's maxrenewlife should be set so that it can be renewed enough times for the HBase client process to complete. For example, if a user runs a long-running HBase client process that takes at most 3 days, we might create this user's principal within kadmin with: addprinc -maxrenewlife 3days Long running daemons with indefinite lifetimes that require client access to HBase can instead be configured to log in from a keytab. For each host running such daemons, create a keytab with kadmin or kadmin.local. The procedure for creating keytabs for HBase service is the same as for creating keytabs for Hadoop. Those steps are omitted here. Copy the resulting keytab files to where the client daemon will execute and make them readable only to the user account under which the daemon will run.
Server-side Configuration for Secure Operation
Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster: hbase.security.authentication kerberos hbase.security.authorization true hbase.rpc.engine org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.SecureRpcEngine hbase.coprocessor.region.classes org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.token.TokenProvider ]]> A full shutdown and restart of HBase service is required when deploying these configuration changes.
Client-side Configuration for Secure Operation
Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file on every client: hbase.security.authentication kerberos hbase.rpc.engine org.apache.hadoop.hbase.ipc.SecureRpcEngine ]]> The client environment must be logged in to Kerberos from KDC or keytab via the kinit command before communication with the HBase cluster will be possible. Be advised that if the hbase.security.authentication and hbase.rpc.engine properties in the client- and server-side site files do not match, the client will not be able to communicate with the cluster. Once HBase is configured for secure RPC it is possible to optionally configure encrypted communication. To do so, add the following to the hbase-site.xml file on every client: hbase.rpc.protection privacy ]]> This configuration property can also be set on a per connection basis. Set it in the Configuration supplied to HTable: Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create(); conf.set("hbase.rpc.protection", "privacy"); HTable table = new HTable(conf, tablename); Expect a ~10% performance penalty for encrypted communication.
Client-side Configuration for Secure Operation - Thrift Gateway
Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file for every Thrift gateway: hbase.thrift.keytab.file /etc/hbase/conf/hbase.keytab hbase.thrift.kerberos.principal $USER/_HOST@HADOOP.LOCALDOMAIN ]]> Substitute the appropriate credential and keytab for $USER and $KEYTAB respectively. The Thrift gateway will authenticate with HBase using the supplied credential. No authentication will be performed by the Thrift gateway itself. All client access via the Thrift gateway will use the Thrift gateway's credential and have its privilege.
Client-side Configuration for Secure Operation - REST Gateway
Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file for every REST gateway: hbase.rest.keytab.file $KEYTAB hbase.rest.kerberos.principal $USER/_HOST@HADOOP.LOCALDOMAIN ]]> Substitute the appropriate credential and keytab for $USER and $KEYTAB respectively. The REST gateway will authenticate with HBase using the supplied credential. No authentication will be performed by the REST gateway itself. All client access via the REST gateway will use the REST gateway's credential and have its privilege. It should be possible for clients to authenticate with the HBase cluster through the REST gateway in a pass-through manner via SPEGNO HTTP authentication. This is future work.
Access Control Newer releases of HBase (>= 0.92) support optional access control list (ACL-) based protection of resources on a column family and/or table basis. This describes how to set up Secure HBase for access control, with an example of granting and revoking user permission on table resources provided.
Prerequisites
You must configure HBase for secure operation. Refer to the section "Secure Client Access to HBase" and complete all of the steps described there. You must also configure ZooKeeper for secure operation. Changes to ACLs are synchronized throughout the cluster using ZooKeeper. Secure authentication to ZooKeeper must be enabled or otherwise it will be possible to subvert HBase access control via direct client access to ZooKeeper. Refer to the section on secure ZooKeeper configuration and complete all of the steps described there.
Overview
With Secure RPC and Access Control enabled, client access to HBase is authenticated and user data is private unless access has been explicitly granted. Access to data can be granted at a table or per column family basis. However, the following items have been left out of the initial implementation for simplicity: Row-level or per value (cell): This would require broader changes for storing the ACLs inline with rows. It is a future goal. Push down of file ownership to HDFS: HBase is not designed for the case where files may have different permissions than the HBase system principal. Pushing file ownership down into HDFS would necessitate changes to core code. Also, while HDFS file ownership would make applying quotas easy, and possibly make bulk imports more straightforward, it is not clear that it would offer a more secure setup. HBase managed "roles" as collections of permissions: We will not model "roles" internally in HBase to begin with. We instead allow group names to be granted permissions, which allows external modeling of roles via group membership. Groups are created and manipulated externally to HBase, via the Hadoop group mapping service. Access control mechanisms are mature and fairly standardized in the relational database world. The HBase implementation approximates current convention, but HBase has a simpler feature set than relational databases, especially in terms of client operations. We don't distinguish between an insert (new record) and update (of existing record), for example, as both collapse down into a Put. Accordingly, the important operations condense to four permissions: READ, WRITE, CREATE, and ADMIN. Operation To Permission Mapping Permission Operation Read Get Exists Scan Write Put Delete Lock/UnlockRow IncrementColumnValue CheckAndDelete/Put Flush Compact Create Create Alter Drop Admin Enable/Disable Split Major Compact Grant Revoke Shutdown
Permissions can be granted in any of the following scopes, though CREATE and ADMIN permissions are effective only at table scope. Table Read: User can read from any column family in table Write: User can write to any column family in table Create: User can alter table attributes; add, alter, or drop column families; and drop the table. Admin: User can alter table attributes; add, alter, or drop column families; and enable, disable, or drop the table. User can also trigger region (re)assignments or relocation. Column Family Read: User can read from the column family Write: User can write to the column family There is also an implicit global scope for the superuser. The superuser is a principal, specified in the HBase site configuration file, that has equivalent access to HBase as the 'root' user would on a UNIX derived system. Normally this is the principal that the HBase processes themselves authenticate as. Although future versions of HBase Access Control may support multiple superusers, the superuser privilege will always include the principal used to run the HMaster process. Only the superuser is allowed to create tables, switch the balancer on or off, or take other actions with global consequence. Furthermore, the superuser has an implicit grant of all permissions to all resources. Tables have a new metadata attribute: OWNER, the user principal who owns the table. By default this will be set to the user principal who creates the table, though it may be changed at table creation time or during an alter operation by setting or changing the OWNER table attribute. Only a single user principal can own a table at a given time. A table owner will have all permissions over a given table.
Server-side Configuration for Access Control
Enable the AccessController coprocessor in the cluster configuration and restart HBase. The restart can be a rolling one. Complete the restart of all Master and RegionServer processes before setting up ACLs. To enable the AccessController, modify the hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster to look like: hbase.coprocessor.master.classes org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.access.AccessController hbase.coprocessor.region.classes org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.token.TokenProvider, org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.access.AccessController ]]>
Shell Enhancements for Access Control
The HBase shell has been extended to provide simple commands for editing and updating user permissions. The following commands have been added for access control list management: Grant grant <user> <permissions> <table> [ <column family> [ <column qualifier> ] ] <permissions> is zero or more letters from the set "RWCA": READ('R'), WRITE('W'), CREATE('C'), ADMIN('A'). Note: Grants and revocations of individual permissions on a resource are both accomplished using the grant command. A separate revoke command is also provided by the shell, but this is for fast revocation of all of a user's access rights to a given resource only. Revoke revoke <user> <table> [ <column family> [ <column qualifier> ] ] Alter The alter command has been extended to allow ownership assignment: alter 'tablename', {OWNER => 'username'} User Permission The user_permission command shows all access permissions for the current user for a given table: user_permission