Managing object permissions using internal authorization

Use GRANT/REVOKE to grant or revoke permissions to access Cassandra data.

You use the familiar relational database GRANT/REVOKE paradigm to grant or revoke permissions to access Cassandra data. A superuser grants initial permissions, and subsequently a user may or may not be given the permission to grant/revoke permissions. Object permission management is independent of authentication (works with Kerberos or Cassandra).

CQL supports the following authorization statements:

Accessing system resources 

Read access to these system tables is implicitly given to every authenticated user because the tables are used by most Cassandra tools:

  • system.schema_keyspace
  • system.schema_columns
  • system.schema_columnfamilies
  • system.local
  • system.peers

Configuration 

CassandraAuthorizer is one of many possible IAuthorizer implementations, and the one that stores permissions in the system_auth.permissions table to support all authorization-related CQL statements. Configuration consists mainly of changing the authorizer option in cassandra.yaml as described in Configuring internal authentication and authorization.

The location of the cassandra.yaml file depends on the type of installation:
Package installations /etc/dse/cassandra/cassandra.yaml
Tarball installations install_location/resources/cassandra/conf/cassandra.yaml
Note: You must set internal authentication and authorization at the same time.