Securing Hive and Impala without Sentry
Last updated
Last updated
Audience: System Administrators
Content Summary: Immuta offers both fine- and coarse-grained protection for Hive and Impala tables for users who access data via the or the . However, additional protections are required to ensure that users cannot gain unauthorized access to data by connecting to Hive or Impala directly. Cloudera recommends using the Sentry service to secure access to Hive and Impala. As an alternative, this guide details steps that CDH cluster administrators can take to lock down Hive and Impala access without running the Sentry service.
Each section in this guide is a required step to ensure that access to Hive and Impala is secured.
After installing Immuta on your cluster, users will still be able to connect to Hive via the hive shell, beeline
, or JDBC/ODBC connections. To prevent users from circumventing Immuta and gaining unauthorized access to data, you can leverage HDFS Access control lists (ACLs) without running Sentry.
See the official to complete this step.
In order to leverage ACLs to secure Hive, Hive impersonation must be enabled. To enable Hive impersonation in Cloudera manager, set hive.server2.enable.impersonation, hive.server2.enable.doAs
to true
in the Hive service configuration.
Group in this context refers to Linux groups, not Sentry groups.
You must configure ACLs for each location in HDFS that Hive data will be stored in to restrict access to hive
, impala
, and data owners that belong to a particular group. You can accomplish this by running the commands below.
In this example, we are allowing members of the hive
and examplegroup
to select & insert on tables in hive. Note that the hive
group only contains the hive
and impala
users, while examplegroup
contains the privileged users who would be considered potential data owners in Immuta.
By default, Hive stores data in HDFS under /user/hive/warehouse
. However, you can change this directory in the above example if you are using a different data storage location on your cluster.
After installing Immuta on your cluster, users will still be able to connect to Impala via impala-shell
or JDBC/ODBC connections. To prevent users from circumventing Immuta and gaining unauthorized access to data, you can leverage policy configuration files for Impala without running Sentry.
Group in this context refers to Linux groups, not Sentry groups.
The policy configuration file that will drive Impala's security must be in .ini
format. The example below will grant users in group examplegroup
the ability to read and write data in the default
database. You can add additional groups and roles that correspond to different databases or tables.
This policy configuration file assigns the group called examplegroup
to the roles example_insert_role
and example_select_role
, which grant insert and select (read and write) privileges on all tables in the default
database.
Next, place the policy configuration file (we will call it policy.ini
) in HDFS. The policy file should be owned by the impala
user, and should only be accessible by the impala
user. See below for an example.
You can configure Impala to leverage your new policy file by navigating to Impala's configuration in Cloudera Manager and modifying Impala Daemon Command Line Argument Advanced Configuration Snippet (Safety Valve)
with the snippet below.
You must restart the Impala service in Cloudera Manager to implement the policy changes. Note that server_name
should correspond to the server
that you define in your policy roles. Also note that each key-value pair should be placed on its own line in the configuration snippet.
See the official for a detailed guide on policy configuration files. Note that while the guide mentions Sentry, running the Sentry service is not required to leverage policy configuration files.