Book Image

Securing Hadoop

By : Sudheesh Narayan
Book Image

Securing Hadoop

By: Sudheesh Narayan

Overview of this book

Security of Big Data is one of the biggest concerns for enterprises today. How do we protect the sensitive information in a Hadoop ecosystem? How can we integrate Hadoop security with existing enterprise security systems? What are the challenges in securing Hadoop and its ecosystem? These are the questions which need to be answered in order to ensure effective management of Big Data. Hadoop, along with Kerberos, provides security features which enable Big Data management and which keep data secure. This book is a practitioner's guide for securing a Hadoop-based Big Data platform. This book provides you with a step-by-step approach to implementing end-to-end security along with a solid foundation of knowledge of the Hadoop and Kerberos security models. This practical, hands-on guide looks at the security challenges involved in securing sensitive data in a Hadoop-based Big Data platform and also covers the Security Reference Architecture for securing Big Data. It will take you through the internals of the Hadoop and Kerberos security models and will provide detailed implementation steps for securing Hadoop. You will also learn how the internals of the Hadoop security model are implemented, how to integrate Enterprise Security Systems with Hadoop security, and how you can manage and control user access to a Hadoop ecosystem seamlessly. You will also get acquainted with implementing audit logging and security incident monitoring within a Big Data platform.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Securing Hadoop
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The Hadoop default security model without Kerberos


Now that we understand how the Kerberos security protocol works, let us look at the details of the Hadoop default security model and its limitations.

Hadoop implements a security model similar to the POSIX filesystem, which gives the ability to apply file permissions and restrict read-write access to files and directories in HDFS. The user and admin can use the chmod and chown commands to change the permissions and ownership of the file/directories, similar to the POSIX filesystem. Hadoop does not provide any user management functionality. It uses the operating system user within Hadoop.

By default, Hadoop doesn't support any authentication of users or Hadoop services. A user only authenticates with the operating system during the logon process. After that, when the user invokes the Hadoop command, the user ID and group is set by executing whoami and bash -c groups respectively. So if a user writes their own whoami script and adds it to the...