I attached the first draft of my SSL patch for comment to https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACCUMULO-1009.
To generate keys, in $ACCUMULO_HOME, mkdir conf/ssl and run: bin/accumulo org.apache.accumulo.server.security.ssl.CertUtils generate-all --local-keystore conf/ssl/keystore.jks --root-keystore conf/ssl/root.jks --root-truststore conf/ssl/truststore.jks then you can turn it on with instance.ssl.enabled=true in your site config. Keystore locations and passwords are all configurable, but the defaults should work without any additional config (private keys protected with instance secret, and the public root cert is in a separate passwordless truststore). To create an SSL connection from a client, you can use the new ZKInstance constructor that takes an additional boolean ssl parameter, or just echo instance.ssl.enabled=true >> ~/.accumulo/config to SSL all of your client connections. If you're running your client on the same machine where you generated certs, the default path will still work for you. Otherwise, echo ssl.client.truststore.path=/path/to/truststore.jks >> ~/.accumulo/config. I'm imagining the common usage scenario will be to have your truststore path in local client config, but leave whether or not SSL is enabled up to each individual client application. I added a couple SSL-enabled integration tests that cover a range of connection scenarios (plain instance connectors, mapreduce jobs, admin commands), and you can also run all the ITs with SSL enabled with mvn verify -DuseSslForIT. A few tasks I know I still have remaining: - Fail fast if client and server SSL switch is mismatched based on flag in ZK - Interactive cert generation process more like `bin/accumulo init`, rather than running CertUtils with a big pile of switches - SSL support on the client side of the proxy - Docs One known risk is that the Thrift SSL transport only supports blocking connections. This means that when SSL is enabled, we have to switch to a TThreadPoolServer instead of a THsHaServer. In theory the performance impact of this change can be mitigated by cranking up the thread pool size, but I haven't done any scale testing to see what the practical impact of this constraint actually is. At the moment, as long as we use Thrift for transport, I don't think we have much choice. I would love comments, suggestions, questions, etc. Michael
