Authorization in Apache Hadoop
With authentication, we have validated the user. The next step in the security is to implement Service Level Authorization controls for users. Service Level Authorization sets the permissions for users to the different objects in the cluster. These permissions employ controls on the different actions that a user could perform, for example, submitting a MapReduce job, accessing a file on HDFS, and so on.
Service Level Authorization in Hadoop is done by defining an access control list (ACL). The ACLs allow the administrator to define the list of users that have permissions to the different services in Hadoop.
Configuring access control lists in Hadoop
The ACLs are configured in the hadoop-policy.xml file. This file is located under Hadoop's configuration directory. If Cloudera Manager was used to set up CDH on your cluster, you should see this configuration file under the /opt/cloudera/parcels/<CDH VERSION>/etc/hadoop/conf.dist directory.
In the cluster, which...
