About DSE Unified Authentication

DSE Unified Authentication facilitates connectivity to three primary backend authentication and authorization services. DSE Unified Authentication uses the following services:

DSE Authenticator supports validating user identity against any of the following authentication schemes:
- Internal: Connections provide credentials for a role that has an internally stored password. No additional configuration is required. See Setting up logins and users.
- LDAP: Connections provide LDAP credentials. DSE passes the credentials for verification to LDAP. See Defining an LDAP scheme.
- Kerberos: Connections provide a Kerberos ticket. DSE is configured as a Service Principal (see Setting up Kerberos) and passes the tickets to the Key Dsitribution Service (KDS) for verification. See Defining a Kerberos scheme.
When a connection request specifies an authentication scheme, DSE Authenticator validates the user against the selected scheme first. If no scheme is specified in the connection request or the validation fails, DSE Authenticator will try the default_scheme and then each scheme defined in other_schemes.

It is possible to authenticate users without implementing access control using the DSE Authenticator; however, authentication is required for authorization and role management.
DSE Role Manager assigns roles using one of the following modes:
- Internal: 1-1 mapping using an internally stored password. Requires a role for each account.
- LDAP: 1- many mapping. Assigns DSE roles that match the users' LDAP groups.
  
  For LDAP role management, DSE disables role nesting; you cannot use GRANT to assign a role to another role.

DSE Authorizer analyzes the request against the role permissions on each affected resource before allowing the request to be executed.

Set and remove permissions on database resources with the CQL commands GRANT and REVOKE.

Enable support for row-level access control, which allow permissions to be granted by filtering on a partition column, by setting authorization_options row_level_access_control to true. See Enabling DSE Unified Authentication and Setting up Row Level Access Control (RLAC).

Steps for new deployment: How to enable DSE Unified Authentication on a new deployment.
Steps for production environments: Steps for enabling DSE Unified Authentication without downtime when implementing in a production or otherwise existing DataStax Enterprise environment.