Thank you Andrew and all who replied,
It is good to know what's available and what's not, so that I can plan
the way my
application works.
Having no security is a big issue for me, since I am using Hbase on EC2.
Knowing the internal IP of the Hbase master is the only thing a hacker
needs to bring my
database down.
In fact I could write a script now, to go and create a table in any
Hbase running out
there on ec2. Of course, I don't have the motivation or time to to do
that, but others
might do.
Your answers are telling me not to commit my designs to Hbase and have
another system to
fall back to. Or maybe just learn how to build an application around
Hbase, while the
latter is being developed/improved/patched up.
I understand that I should not expect to have all features I would
like available in
Hbase, not least because it is provided free of charge and there is a
number of
committed, good people trying to make everyone happy.
However I believe that security should have been the first priority in
the development
process. It just makes sense to me.
I suggest the wiki should have a FAQ about security, as I had to
search google for an
answer, but couldn't find any good sources.
I hope my question and your timely response might help someone out
there looking for this
answer.
Many thanks to all, and keep up the good work.
kind regards,
Jalil
Quoting Andrew Purtell <[email protected]>:
Is a security feature available that I am not aware of? if
not? what is the point to create a database that can be
edited/deleted by anonymous users?
That's kind of a loaded question but I'll bite.
Single tenancy is common in systems of this type, which are meant
for deployment into back end systems and underpin some customer
facing application, but do not directly serve access to arbitrary
users. Hadoop in general has at best a weak notion of user
separation. Until Yahoo released a variant of 0.20 that uses
Kerberos for strong autentication it was trivial to masquerade as
any user, completely bypassing UGI permissions in HDFS. There are
some remaining problems but secure Hadoop (secure HDFS) does provide
some data isolation.
We have a patched version of HBase that can run on top of secure
Hadoop. You immediately get the benefit of HDFS data isolation --
other system users cannot access _your_ HBase data in HDFS. And they
cannot authenticate as you so cannot connect to _your_ HBase
cluster if you configure it as such.
However, in fact HBase as a project does want to support a fine
grained permissions model such that you'd expect coming from
Postgres or MySQL or Oracle, multitenancy intrinsic to the database.
See HBASE-1697, HBASE-3025, and HBASE-3045, as issues to watch over
the coming few months.
Best regards,
- Andy
--- On Fri, 10/1/10, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: How do I setup authentication/permissions for an hbase database?
To: [email protected]
Date: Friday, October 1, 2010, 5:04 AM
Hello,
I cannot find any information about secure user access to
an hbase database.
I want to create an hbase database but want to allow only
certain users to access it.
Currently, anyone can access, write to, delete my tables in
my hbase database.
Is a security feature available that I am not aware of? if
not? what is the point to create a database that can be
edited/deleted by anonymous users?
Many thanks,
Jalil
