Introduction 

Implement configuring impersonation at the Application level. 

Goals

• Application Impersonation: As a part of, CDAP-6131 - Ability for CDAP to run programs as a particular user. ( In Progress) we implemented impersonation for programs and data operations, but this could only be configured at the namespace level. We need the ability to configure this at the application level, so that we can run programs as different users, without having to manage additional namespaces for each app.
• Entity ownership: CDAP-8065 - Entity Ownership: Entities in CDAP should have an owner and a group ( Open) Entities created by applications should be owned by the application owner.
• Explore Impersonation (Stretch Goal): As a part of, CDAP-6587 - Impersonate users when performing hive operations ( Resolved) we implemented impersonation in Hive for Explore queries to impersonate the namespace user if one was provided. For better security measures we will like to run explore queries as the user who submits them.
  
  

Scenario 1: App Creation

Scenario 2: Dataset Creation/Maintenance

Scenario 3: Access Control

1. Jules is a human user who does not have CDAP credentials and wants to run a Hive query outside of CDAP. Her access to the data can be controlled by group permissions.
2. Mary is a headless user who owns a CDAP program that reads from a dataset owned by Louis. An admin adds Mary to the group for the dataset. The program owned by Mary can now read the dataset.
3. (Stretch) Eve is a human user who has both LDAP and kerberos credentials. She logs into the CDAP UI with her LDAP credentials and submits a query. While submitting the query she provides her kerberos principal and password. The query should be run as her kerberos principal.

Design

• Impersonation is done using keytabs. All keytabs are accessible by the cdap user on all master nodes
• User IDs to be impersonated must be set up outside of CDAP

• For this user to keytab management we will use the following conventions:

  • All keytabs are present on the local filesystem on which CDAP master is running. 
  • These keytabs are present under path which can be in one of the following formats and cdap has read access on all the keytabs. 
    
    1. /dir1>/<dir2>/${user.name}.keytab
    2. /dir1>/<dir2>/${user.name}/${user.name}.keytab

  • The above path is provided to cdap as a configuration parameter in cdap-security.xml

    <property>
       <name>security.keytab.dir</name>
       <value>/dir1>/<dir2>/${user.name}.keytab
    </value>
    </property>

• User ID to keytab mapping is managed separately from apps with its own API
• Configuring an app for impersonation requires admin on the CDAP instance, with CDAP authorization
• Without CDAP authorization any user will be able to impersonate any other user
• After an app is deployed, any user with sufficient privileges on the program can start/stop programs, see its status, see metrics, see logs, etc. All such actions will be impersonated as the owner of the app regardless of the user doing it.
• Explore will not be impersonated the same way, Explore queries will be run as the kerberos principal provided by the user submitting the query. 
• The user submitting the query will specify a kerberos username and password and CDAP will kinit on user's behalf.
• Audit log will show which logged in user impersonated whom to run a query. 
  
  

For detailed design, please see Secure Impersonation - Security 4.1

API changes

New REST APIs

Entity Ownership:

{
 "key1":"value1",
 "key2":"value2",
 "owner":"owner-principal"
}

{
  "ttl" : 9223372036854775,
  "format": {
    "name": "text",
    "schema": {
      "type": "record",
      "name": "stringBody",
      "fields": [
        { "name": "body", "type": "string" }
      ]
    },
    "settings": {}
  },
  "notification.threshold.mb" : 1024,
  "description" : "Web access logs",
  "owner" : "owner-principal"
}

{
 "key1":"value1",
 "key2":"value2",
 "owner":"owner-principal"
}

Entity Creation:

Create APIs for Stream/Datasets and Applications will take two additional JSON properties.

1. Owner name as string specified as:

    

   {  "owner": "username"  "group": "groupname" }

CLI Impact or Changes

• (optional) Create CLI for the above REST APIs

UI Impact or Changes

• Error rendering macro 'jira' : Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration.
   Provide a way for the user to specify kerberos credentials while launching an Explore query 
• (optional) Create UI for the above REST APIs

Security Impact 

Authorization will need to be implemented on the new REST APIs (which manage the impersonation metadata and the users and their credentials ). Authorization will also need to be added when programmatically accessing this metadata (such as when launching the programs or performing dataset operations involving impersonation).

Impact on Infrastructure Outages 

This will rely on HBase for storing metadata (Similar to how we store all sorts of other metadata for applications). Without HBase (and dataset service), this will not work.

Releases

Release 4.1.0

Future work

• Support ACLs for the HDFS files and HBase tables that are created when new CDAP entities are created.
• Push down ACLs to the storage providers.
• Support changing entity ownership