Configure HCD Unified Authentication in a live cluster

To implement HCD Unified Authentication in an existing deployment (a live cluster) without downtime or interrupted access, use transitional modes to temporarily support applications and users that don’t have accounts:

Update all applications to provide credentials and ensure that they use the latest version of a supported Apache Cassandra driver.

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.
Run a full repair of the system_auth keyspace.
On each node, enable authentication and authorization in transitional mode:
- Set authentication.transitional_mode to permissive in the cassandra.yaml file.
- Set authorization.transitional_mode to normal in the cassandra.yaml file.
For more information, see Enable HCD Unified Authentication.
Enable logging so you can verify that applications are authenticating successfully.
Enable JMX authentication.

Perform a rolling restart of all nodes in the cluster.

Nodes are vulnerable to malicious activity following this restart. Anybody can access the system using the default cassandra account with password cassandra. DataStax recommends isolating the cluster until you disable the cassandra account.

Additionally, using the default cassandra account can impact performance because all requests, including login, execute with consistency level QUORUM. DataStax recommends using the cassandra account only to create a new superuser (root) account.

After all nodes restart, use cqlsh to replace the cassandra default account with a superuser login.
Switch to the new superuser account, and then configure roles and assign permissions.
Disable or drop the default cassandra account.
Monitor audit logs to verify that all applications can access nodes and have the permissions required to execute requests.
In the cassandra.yaml file, set authenticator.parameters.enabled to true, and then configure specific authentication schemes, such as LDAP.
Perform a rolling restart of the cluster.

Configure HCD Unified Authentication in a live cluster

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