The data protection feature makes data unreadable both in transit over the network and at rest on a disk. HDP satisfies security and compliance requirements by using both transparent data encryption (TDE) to encrypt data for HDFS files, along with a Ranger-embedded open source Hadoop key management store (KMS). Ranger enables security administrators to manage keys and authorization policies for KMS. Hortonworks is also working extensively with its encryption partners to integrate HDFS encryption with enterprise-grade key management frameworks.

Encryption in HDFS, combined with KMS access policies maintained by Ranger, prevents rogue Linux or Hadoop administrators from accessing data, and supports segregation of duties for both data access and encryption.