Steps for Production Environments

To enable access control without downtime or interrupting services, use transitional modes to temporarily support applications and users that do not have accounts.

Procedure

Update all applications to provide credentials and ensure that they use the latest DSE driver, see DataStax drivers. When using authentication.transitional_mode, you can provide a blank username and password to log in with the anonymous role.

When authentication and authorization are disabled, the credentials portion of the connection request is ignored. After authentication is enabled all connections must provide credentials.
Change the replication factor for the security keyspaces, see Configuring the security keyspaces replication factors.
Run a full repair of the system_auth and dse_auth keyspace.
On each node, enable authentication and authorization in transitional mode:
- Set authentication_options and transitional_mode to permissive.
- Set authorization_options and auth_transitional_mode to normal.
  
  See Enabling DSE Unified Authentication.
Turn on logging to allow verification that applications can authenticate. See Setting up database auditing.
Enable JMX authentication, see Controlling access to JMX MBeans.

Perform a rolling restart.

The transactional nodes are vulnerable to malicious activity following the restart. Anybody can access the system using the default cassandra account with password cassandra. DataStax recommends isolating the cluster until after disabling the cassandra account.

After the restarts are complete, use cqlsh to replace the cassandra default account, see Adding a superuser login.

Using the default cassandra account may impact performance. All requests including login execute with consistency level QUORUM. DataStax recommends using this account only to create your root account.

Switch to the new root account and configure roles and assign permissions, see Setting up logins and users.
Use the audit logs, or the KDC logs when using Kerberos, to verify that all applications can access the transactional nodes and have the permissions required to execute requests. See Log formats.
In the dse.yaml file, set authentication_options and authorization_options transitional_mode to disabled.
Perform a rolling restart.