Cloudera Docs

Transparent Encryption Recommendations for Hive

HDFS encryption has been designed so that files cannot be moved from one encryption zone to another or from encryption zones to unencrypted directories. Therefore, the landing zone for data when using the LOAD DATA INPATH command must always be inside the destination encryption zone.

To use HDFS encryption with Hive, ensure you are using one of the following configurations:

Single Encryption Zone

With this configuration, you can use HDFS encryption by having all Hive data inside the same encryption zone. In Cloudera Manager, configure the Hive Scratch Directory (hive.exec.scratchdir) to be inside the encryption zone.

Recommended HDFS Path: /warehouse/tablespace/

To use the auto-generated KMS ACL, make sure you name the encryption key hive-key.

For example, to configure a single encryption zone for the entire Hive warehouse, you can rename /warehouse/tablespace/ to /warehouse/tablespace-old, create an encryption zone at /warehouse/tablespace/, and then distcp all the data from /warehouse/tablespace-old to /warehouse/tablespace/.

In Cloudera Manager, configure the Hive Scratch Directory (hive.exec.scratchdir) to be inside the encryption zone by setting it to /warehouse/tablespace/tmp, ensuring that permissions are 1777 on /warehouse/tablespace/tmp.

Multiple Encryption Zones

With this configuration, you can use encrypted databases or tables with different encryption keys. To read data from read-only encrypted tables, users must have access to a temporary directory that is encrypted at least as strongly as the table.

For example:

  1. Configure two encrypted tables, ezTbl1 and ezTbl2.
  2. Create two new encryption zones, /data/ezTbl1 and /data/ezTbl2.
  3. Load data to the tables in Hive using LOAD statements.

Other Encrypted Directories

  • LOCALSCRATCHDIR: The MapJoin optimization in Hive writes HDFS tables to a local directory and then uploads them to the distributed cache. To ensure these files are encrypted, either disable MapJoin by setting hive.auto.convert.join to false, or encrypt the local Hive Scratch directory (hive.exec.local.scratchdir) using Cloudera Navigator Encrypt.
  • DOWNLOADED_RESOURCES_DIR: JARs that are added to a user session and stored in HDFS are downloaded to hive.downloaded.resources.dir on the HiveServer2 local filesystem. To encrypt these JAR files, configure Cloudera Navigator Encrypt to encrypt the directory specified by hive.downloaded.resources.dir.
  • NodeManager Local Directory List: Hive stores JARs and MapJoin files in the distributed cache. To use MapJoin or encrypt JARs and other resource files, the yarn.nodemanager.local-dirs YARN configuration property must be configured to a set of encrypted local directories on all nodes.