Appendix: Creating an HDFS Admin User
To capitalize on the capabilities of HDFS data at rest encryption, you will need two separate types of HDFS administrative accounts:
HDFS administrative user: an account in the
hdfs
supergroup that is used to manage encryption keys and encryption zones. Examples in this chapter use an administrative user account namedencr
.HDFS service user: the system-level account traditionally associated with HDFS. By default this is user
hdfs
in HDP. This account owns the HDFS DataNode and NameNode processes.Important This is a system-only account. Physical users should not be given access to this account.
Complete the following steps to create a new HDFS administrative user.
Note: These steps use sample values for group
(operator
) and user account (opt1
).
Create a new group called
operator
.Add a new user (for example,
opt1
) to the group.Add principal
opt1@EXAMPLE.COM
and create a keytab.Login as
opt1
, and do akinit
operation.In Ambari, replace the current value of
dfs.permissions.superusergroup
with the group name “operator”.In Ambari, add
hdfs,operator
todfs.cluster.administrators
:Add
opt1
to the KMS blacklist. Set the corresponding property in Ambari:hadoop.kms.blacklist.DECRYPT_EEK=opt1
Restart HDFS.
Validation
Make sure the opt1
account has HDFS administrative access:
hdfs dfsadmin -report
Make sure the opt1
account cannot access encrypted files. For
example, if /data/test/file.txt
is in an encryption zone, the
following command should return an error:
hdfs dfs -cat /data/test/file.txt
Additional Administrative User Accounts
If you plan to use HDFS data at rest encryption with YARN, we recommend that you create a separate administrative user account for YARN administration.
If you plan to use HDFS data at rest encryption with Oozie, refer to the Oozie section of this chapter.