You need to have a working Kerberos KDC.

A HBase configured for secure client access is expected to be running on top of a secured HDFS cluster. HBase must be able to authenticate to HDFS services. HBase needs Kerberos credentials to interact with the Kerberos-enabled HDFS daemons. Authenticating a service should be done using a keytab file. The procedure for creating keytabs for HBase service is the same as for creating keytabs for Hadoop. Those steps are omitted here. Copy the resulting keytab files to wherever HBase Master and RegionServer processes are deployed and make them readable only to the user account under which the HBase daemons will run.

A Kerberos principal has three parts, with the form username/fully.qualified.domain.name@YOUR-REALM.COM. We recommend using hbase as the username portion.

The following is an example of the configuration properties for Kerberos operation that must be added to the hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster. Required for even the most basic interactions with a secure Hadoop configuration, independent of HBase security.

      <property>
        <name>hbase.regionserver.kerberos.principal</name>
        <value>hbase/_HOST@YOUR-REALM.COM</value>
      </property>
      <property>
        <name>hbase.regionserver.keytab.file</name>
        <value>/etc/hbase/conf/keytab.krb5</value>
      </property>
      <property>
        <name>hbase.master.kerberos.principal</name>
        <value>hbase/_HOST@YOUR-REALM.COM</value>
      </property>
      <property>
        <name>hbase.master.keytab.file</name>
        <value>/etc/hbase/conf/keytab.krb5</value>
      </property>
    

Each HBase client user should also be given a Kerberos principal. This principal should have a password assigned to it (as opposed to a keytab file). The client principal's maxrenewlife should be set so that it can be renewed enough times for the HBase client process to complete. For example, if a user runs a long-running HBase client process that takes at most 3 days, we might create this user's principal within kadmin with: addprinc -maxrenewlife 3days

Long running daemons with indefinite lifetimes that require client access to HBase can instead be configured to log in from a keytab. For each host running such daemons, create a keytab with kadmin or kadmin.local. The procedure for creating keytabs for HBase service is the same as for creating keytabs for Hadoop. Those steps are omitted here. Copy the resulting keytab files to where the client daemon will execute and make them readable only to the user account under which the daemon will run.

Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file on every server machine in the cluster:

      <property>
        <name>hbase.security.authentication</name>
        <value>kerberos</value> 
      </property> 
      <property>
        <name>hbase.security.authorization</name>
        <value>true</value>
      </property>
      <property>
      <name>hbase.coprocessor.region.classes</name>
        <value>org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.token.TokenProvider</value>
      </property>
    

A full shutdown and restart of HBase service is required when deploying these configuration changes.

Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file on every client:

      <property>
        <name>hbase.security.authentication</name>
        <value>kerberos</value>
      </property> 
    

The client environment must be logged in to Kerberos from KDC or keytab via the kinit command before communication with the HBase cluster will be possible.

Be advised that if the hbase.security.authentication in the client- and server-side site files do not match, the client will not be able to communicate with the cluster.

Once HBase is configured for secure RPC it is possible to optionally configure encrypted communication. To do so, add the following to the hbase-site.xml file on every client:

      <property>
        <name>hbase.rpc.protection</name>
        <value>privacy</value>
      </property>
    

This configuration property can also be set on a per connection basis. Set it in the Configuration supplied to HTable:

      Configuration conf = HBaseConfiguration.create();
      conf.set("hbase.rpc.protection", "privacy");
      HTable table = new HTable(conf, tablename);
    

Expect a ~10% performance penalty for encrypted communication.

Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file for every Thrift gateway:

    <property>
      <name>hbase.thrift.keytab.file</name>
      <value>/etc/hbase/conf/hbase.keytab</value>
    </property>
    <property>
      <name>hbase.thrift.kerberos.principal</name>
      <value>$USER/_HOST@HADOOP.LOCALDOMAIN</value>
    </property>
    

Substitute the appropriate credential and keytab for $USER and $KEYTAB respectively.

The Thrift gateway will authenticate with HBase using the supplied credential. No authentication will be performed by the Thrift gateway itself. All client access via the Thrift gateway will use the Thrift gateway's credential and have its privilege.

Add the following to the hbase-site.xml file for every REST gateway:

    <property>
      <name>hbase.rest.keytab.file</name>
      <value>$KEYTAB</value>
    </property>
    <property>
      <name>hbase.rest.kerberos.principal</name>
      <value>$USER/_HOST@HADOOP.LOCALDOMAIN</value>
    </property>
    

Substitute the appropriate credential and keytab for $USER and $KEYTAB respectively.

The REST gateway will authenticate with HBase using the supplied credential. No authentication will be performed by the REST gateway itself. All client access via the REST gateway will use the REST gateway's credential and have its privilege.

It should be possible for clients to authenticate with the HBase cluster through the REST gateway in a pass-through manner via SPEGNO HTTP authentication. This is future work.