Add a superuser account

After you enable role-based access control (RBAC), create your own superuser account and disable or drop the default cassandra account. Roles that you create with the superuser option have full access to the database, and users with the superuser role can run any Cassandra Query Language shell (cqlsh) commands on all database resources.

Only provide superuser roles to a limited number of users.

When you configure role_management_options for LDAP group management, set the mode_by_authentication field to ldap to prevent unintentional role assignment.
For authentication_options, set scheme_permissions to true and bind the superuser role to the internal scheme. For more information, see Bind a role to an authentication scheme).

DataStax Enterprise (DSE) includes the default role cassandra with a default password of cassandra. The cassandra role is a superuser login account that has full access to the database. Requests from the cassandra account, including login, use a consistency level of QUORUM. QUORUM might cause significant performance degradation in multiple datacenter environments.

Because of these security and performance considerations, DataStax recommends that you use the cassandra role only once during the initial RBAC setup. Establish your own root account with superuser privileges, and then disable or drop the cassandra role.

Requests from all other authenticated accounts have a consistency level of LOCAL_ONE. For more information, see How is the consistency level configured?

Prerequisites

Isolate the DSE cluster and enable RBAC. For more information, see Set up logins and users.

Create and use a superuser account

Create a new superuser account and password:

CREATE ROLE <root_user_name>
  WITH SUPERUSER = true
  AND LOGIN = true
  AND PASSWORD = '<password>';

or create the new superuser account with a hashed password:

CREATE ROLE <root_user_name>
  WITH SUPERUSER = true
  AND LOGIN = true
  AND HASHED PASSWORD = '<hashed_password>';

Exit the CQL shell:
```
EXIT;
```

Disable or drop the default `cassandra` account

To disable or drop the cassandra role, log in with the new role created in the Create and use a superuser account step:
```
cqlsh -u <root_user>
```
Enter the password at the prompt.

Use the LIST ROLES command to verify that the role has superuser privileges:

LIST ROLES;

 role                | super | login | options
---------------------+-------+-------+---------
           root_user |  True |  True |        {}
           cassandra |  True |  True |        {}
(2 rows)

Drop or update the cassandra account:
- Drop the cassandra account:
  DROP ROLE cassandra;
- Update the cassandra role by disabling the superuser privileges and changing the password:
  ALTER ROLE cassandra WITH SUPERUSER = false AND LOGIN = false AND PASSWORD='new_secret_pw';
  or with a hashed password:
  ALTER ROLE cassandra WITH SUPERUSER = false AND LOGIN = false AND HASHED PASSWORD='$2a$10$4N5j5py12OySiSy9L2RHduOjFFetJ1d9hqCoZYtQC3kJOwdg3hbOC';
DataStax recommends that you drop the account to secure the database in production environments. When you use an external authentication method, such as LDAP, you can prevent accidental assignment of unnecessary privileges.

Verify that you deleted the cassandra role:

LIST ROLES;

The system no longer lists the cassandra role. Only the new root user that you created appears in the output:

 role                | super | login | options
---------------------+-------+-------+---------
           root_user |  True |  True |        {}

(1 rows)

Reopen the firewall to support production CQL traffic.

Next steps

To set up roles that map to the user or group names for the configured authentication schemes, see Add database users.

Add a superuser account

Prerequisites

Create and use a superuser account

Disable or drop the default `cassandra` account

Next steps

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Add a superuser account

Prerequisites

Create and use a superuser account

Disable or drop the default cassandra account

Next steps

Was this helpful?

Disable or drop the default `cassandra` account