Configuring Authentication with Kerberos

Establishing user identity with strong authentication is the basis for secure access in Hadoop. Users need to reliably identify themselves and then have that identity propagated throughout the Hadoop cluster to access cluster resources. Hortonworks uses Kerberos for authentication.

Kerberos is an industry standard used to authenticate users and resources within a Hadoop cluster. HDP also includes Ambari, which simplifies Kerberos setup, configuration, and maintenance.

By default Ambari requires that a user authenticate using a user name and password. Ambari uses this authentication mechanism whether you configure it to authenticate using its internal database or synchronized with an external source, like LDAP or Active Directory. Optionally, you can configure Ambari to authenticate using Kerberos tokens via SPNEGO (Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism).