Securing Datanodes

Datanodes under Hadoop is traditionally secured by creating a Keytab file on the data nodes. With Ozone, we have moved away to using data node certificates. That is, Kerberos on data nodes is not needed in case of a secure Ozone cluster.

However, we support the legacy Kerberos based Authentication to make it easy for the current set of users.The HDFS configuration keys are the following that is setup in hdfs-site.xml.

Property	Description
dfs.datanode.kerberos.principal	The datanode service principal. e.g. dn/_HOST@REALM.COM
dfs.datanode.keytab.file	The keytab file used by datanode daemon to login as its service principal.
hdds.datanode.http.kerberos.principal	Datanode http server service principal.
hdds.datanode.http.kerberos.keytab	The keytab file used by datanode http server to login as its service principal.

How a data node becomes secure.

Under Ozone, when a data node boots up and discovers SCM’s address, the first thing that data node does is to create a private key and send a certificate request to the SCM.

Certificate Approval via Kerberos Current Model

SCM has a built-in CA, and SCM has to approve this request. If the data node already has a Kerberos key tab, then SCM will trust Kerberos credentials and issue a certificate automatically.

Manual Approval In Progress

If these are band new data nodes and Kerberos key tabs are not present at the data nodes, then this request for the data nodes identity certificate is queued up for approval from the administrator(This is work in progress, not committed in Ozone yet). In other words, the web of trust is established by the administrator of the cluster.

Automatic Approval In Progress

If you running under an container orchestrator like Kubernetes, we rely on Kubernetes to create a one-time token that will be given to data node during boot time to prove the identity of the data node container (This is also work in progress.)

Once a certificate is issued, a data node is secure and Ozone manager can issue block tokens. If there is no data node certificates or the SCM’s root certificate is not present in the data node, then data node will register itself and down load the SCM’s root certificate as well get the certificates for itself.

Next >>