Steps for New Deployment

Here are high-level steps for implementing DSE Unified Authentication in a new deployment.

To implement authentication and authorization in a pre-established DSE environment, additional precautions and steps are required. See Steps for production environments.

Procedure

To configure DSE Unified Authentication:

Ensure that required data for logins and permission management are accessible and in all datacenters. See Configuring the security keyspaces replication factors.
Configure the system settings. See Enabling DSE Unified Authentication.
Configuring authentication and authorization methods (schemes):
- Internally stored passwords. No additional configuration is required create roles with passwords as described in Setting up logins and users.
- External LDAP. See Defining an LDAP scheme.
- Kerberos. See Defining a Kerberos scheme.
Configuring JMX authentication: Requires changes to the cassandra-env.sh for nodetool and dsetool to run against an authentication enabled cluster.

The location of the cassandra-env.sh file depends on the type of installation:
- Package installations: /etc/dse/cassandra/cassandra-env.sh
- Tarball installations: <installation_location>/resources/cassandra/conf/cassandra-env.sh

Restart DSE. See Starting and stopping DataStax Enterprise.

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.

Set up your own root account and disable or drop the default, cassandra account. See Adding a superuser login.

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

Create roles that map to users in the configured schemes and grant permission to allow users access to database resources, such as keyspaces and tables. See Setting up logins and users.

Use the latest DataStax certified drivers in all applications connecting to DSE Unified Authentication-enabled transactional nodes. DSE drivers support all the features of the Cassandra drivers and provide additional support for multiple authentication methods as well as externally managed roles assignment. See DataStax drivers.
Spark component limitations: DataStax Enterprise provides internal authentication support for connecting Spark to DSE transactional nodes, not for authenticating between Spark components.

What is Next

After enabling authentication and authorization, run tools by supplying credentials: