Overview of Data Protection Mechanisms for an Enterprise Data Hub

Hadoop, as a central data hub for many kinds of data within an organization, naturally has different needs for data protection depending on the audience and processes while using a given data set. CDH provides transparent HDFS encryption, ensuring that all sensitive data is encrypted before being stored on disk. This capability, together with enterprise-grade encryption key management with Navigator Key Trustee, delivers the necessary protection to meet regulatory compliance for most enterprises. HDFS Encryption together with Navigator Encrypt (available with Cloudera Enterprise) provides transparent encryption for Hadoop, for both data and metadata. These solutions automatically encrypt data while the cluster continues to run as usual, with a very low performance impact. It is massively scalable, allowing encryption to happen in parallel against all the data nodes - as the cluster grows, encryption grows with it.

Additionally, this transparent encryption is optimized for the Intel chipset for high performance. Intel chipsets include AES-NI co-processors, which provide special capabilities that make encryption workloads run extremely fast. Not all AES-NI is equal, and Cloudera is able to take advantage of the latest Intel advances for even faster performance.

As an example, the figure below shows a sample deployment that uses CDH's transparent HDFS encryption to protect the data stored in HDFS, while Navigator Encrypt is being used to protect all other data on the cluster associated with the Cloudera Manager, Cloudera Navigator, Hive and HBase metadata stores, along with any logs or spills. Navigator Key Trustee is being used to provide robust and fault-tolerant key management.

Encryption can be applied at a number of levels within Hadoop:

• OS Filesystem-level - Encryption can be applied at the Linux operating system filesystem level to cover all files in a volume. An example of this approach is Cloudera Navigator Encrypt (formerly Gazzang zNcrypt) which is available for Cloudera customers licensed for Cloudera Navigator. Navigator Encrypt operates at the Linux volume level, so it can encrypt cluster data inside and outside HDFS, such as temp/spill files, configuration files and metadata databases (to be used only for data related to a CDH cluster). Navigator Encrypt must be used with Cloudera Navigator Key Trustee Server (formerly Gazzang zTrustee).
• Network-level - Encryption can be applied to encrypt data just before it gets sent across a network and to decrypt it just after receipt. In Hadoop, this means coverage for data sent from client user interfaces as well as service-to-service communication like remote procedure calls (RPCs). This protection uses industry-standard protocols such as TLS/SSL.
• HDFS-level - Encryption applied by the HDFS client software. HDFS Transparent Encryption operates at the HDFS folder level, allowing you to encrypt some folders and leave others unencrypted. HDFS transparent encryption cannot encrypt any data outside HDFS. To ensure reliable key storage (so that data is not lost), use Cloudera Navigator Key Trustee Server; the default Java keystore can be used for test purposes. For more information, see Enabling HDFS Encryption Using Cloudera Navigator Key Trustee Server.

  Unlike OS and network-level encryption, HDFS transparent encryption is end-to-end. That is, it protects data at rest and in transit, which makes it more efficient than implementing a combination of OS-level and network-level encryption.

Data redaction is the suppression of sensitive data, such as any personally identifiable information (PII). PII can be used on its own or with other information to identify or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context. Enabling redaction allow you to transform PII to a pattern that does not contain any identifiable information. For example, you could replace all Social Security numbers (SSN) like 123-45-6789with an unintelligible pattern like XXX-XX-XXXX, or replace only part of the SSN (XXX-XX-6789).

Although encryption techniques are available to protect Hadoop data, the underlying problem with using encryption is that an admin who has complete access to the cluster also access to unencrypted sensitive user data. Even users with appropriate ACLs on the data could have access to logs and queries where sensitive data might have leaked.

Data redaction provides compliance with industry regulations such as PCI and HIPAA, which require that access to PII be restricted to only those users whose jobs require such access. PII or other sensitive data must not be available through any other channels to users like cluster administrators or data analysts. However, if you already have permissions to access PII through queries, the query results will not be redacted. Redaction only applies to any incidental leak of data. Queries and query results must not show up in cleartext in logs, configuration files, UIs, or other unprotected areas.

Scope:

Data redaction in CDH targets sensitive SQL data and log files. Currently, you can enable or disable redaction for the whole cluster with a simple HDFS service-wide configuration change. Redaction is implemented with the assumption that sensitive information resides in the data itself, not the metadata. If you enable redaction for a file, only sensitive data inside the file is redacted. Metadata such as the name of the file or file owner is not redacted.

When data redaction is enabled, the following data is redacted:

• Logs in HDFS and any dependent cluster services. Log redaction is not available in Isilon-based clusters.
• Audit data sent to Cloudera Navigator
• SQL query strings displayed by Hue, Hive, and Impala.

For more information on enabling this feature, see Sensitive Data Redaction.

For more information on setting up SSL/TLS certificates, continue reading the topics at TLS/SSL Certificates Overview.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) provides encryption and authentication in communication between the Cloudera Manager Server and Agents. Encryption prevents snooping, and authentication helps prevent problems caused by malicious servers or agents.

Cloudera recommends securing a cluster using Kerberos authentication before enabling encryption such as SSL on a cluster. If you enable SSL for a cluster that does not already have Kerberos authentication configured, a warning will be displayed.

For information on setting up SSL/TLS for CDH services, see Configuring TLS/SSL Encryption for CDH Services.