Andrew Purtell created HBASE-11070:
--------------------------------------
Summary: [AccessController] Restore early-out access denial if the
user has no access at the table or CF level
Key: HBASE-11070
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-11070
Project: HBase
Issue Type: Task
Reporter: Andrew Purtell
Fix For: 0.99.0, 0.98.3
We want to support two different use cases for cell ACLs:
1. The user can see all cells in a table or CF unless a cell ACL denies access
2. The user cannot see any cells in a table or CF unless a cell ACL grants
access
For the sake of flexibility we made it a toggle on an operation by operation
basis. However this changed the behavior of the AccessController with respect
to how requests for which a user has no grant at the table or CF level. Prior
to the cell ACL changes if a user had no grant at the table or CF level, they
would see an AccessDeniedException. We can't do that if we want cell ACLs to
provide exceptional access, so subsequent to the cell ACL changes the user
simply won't see any cells except those which have those exceptional grants at
the cell level.
Feedback on dev@ is this change is undesirable for at least three reasons.
First, it is surprising (Enis and Vandana). Second, the audit trail is affected
or missing (Enis). Third, it allows any user on the cluster to mount targeted
queries against all tables looking for timing differences, that depending on
schema design could possibly leak the existence in row keys of sensitive
information, or leak the size of the table (Todd). Although we can't prevent
timing attacks in general we can limit the scope of what a user can explore by
restoring early-out access denial if the user has no access at the table or CF
level.
We make early-out access denial if the user has no access at the table or CF
level configurable on a per table basis and have the default be the new
behavior, with a release note and paragraph in the security guide explaining
how to reintroduce the old behavior. This would address the above and not
introduce another surprising change among 0.98 releases.
--
This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA
(v6.2#6252)
