Securing Apache HBase in a production environment

HBase is a popular distributed key-value store modeled after Google’s BigTable. HBase can support extremely fast lookups, high write throughput and strong consistency making it suitable for a wide variety of use cases ranging from application data store like Facebook Messaging to analytical use cases like Yahoo Flurry. HBase stores data on HDFS, providing it linear scaling as well as fault-tolerance.

Similar to HDFS, Kerberos integration works by adding SASL based authentication layer in HBase protocol requiring valid SPNs for authentication. In addition, HBase itself uses Kerberos to authenticate against HDFS while storing data. HBase supports cell-level access control, providing a very granular authorization layer.