Securing Cassandra

Cassandra provides various security features to the open source community.

Cassandra provides these security features to the open source community.

• Client-to-node encryption

  Cassandra includes an optional, secure form of communication from a client machine to a database cluster. Client to server SSL ensures data in flight is not compromised and is securely transferred back/forth from client machines.

• Authentication based on internally controlled login accounts/passwords

  Administrators can create users who can be authenticated to Cassandra database clusters using the CREATE USER command. Internally, Cassandra manages user accounts and access to the database cluster using passwords. User accounts may be altered and dropped using the Cassandra Query Language (CQL).

• Object permission management

  Once authenticated into a database cluster using either internal authentication, the next security issue to be tackled is permission management. What can the user do inside the database? Authorization capabilities for Cassandra use the familiar GRANT/REVOKE security paradigm to manage object permissions.