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ScyllaDB Docs ScyllaDB Enterprise ScyllaDB for Administrators Security Enable Authentication

Enable Authentication¶

Authentication is the process where login accounts and their passwords are verified, and the user is allowed access to the database. Authentication is done internally within Scylla and is not done with a third party. Users and passwords are created with roles using a CREATE ROLE statement. Refer to Grant Authorization CQL Reference for details.

The procedure described below enables Authentication on the Scylla servers. It is intended to be used when you do not have applications running with Scylla/Cassandra drivers.

Warning

Once you enable authentication, all clients (such as applications using Scylla/Apache Cassandra drivers) will stop working until they are updated or reconfigured to work with authentication.

If this downtime is not an option, you can follow the instructions in Enable and Disable Authentication Without Downtime, which using a transient state, allows clients to work with or without Authentication at the same time. In this state, you can update the clients (application using Scylla/Apache Cassandra drivers) one at the time. Once all the clients are using Authentication, you can enforce Authentication on all Scylla nodes as well.

Prerequisites¶

Set the system_auth keyspace replication factor to the number of nodes in the datacenter via cqlsh. It allows you to ensure that the user’s information is kept highly available for the cluster. If system_auth is not equal to the number of nodes and a node fails, the user whose information is on that node will be denied access.

For production environments use only NetworkTopologyStrategy.

Single DC (SimpleStrategy)

ALTER KEYSPACE system_auth WITH REPLICATION =
  { 'class' : 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor' : <new_rf> };

For example:

ALTER KEYSPACE system_auth WITH REPLICATION =
  { 'class' : 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor' : 3 };

Multi - DC (NetworkTopologyStrategy)

ALTER KEYSPACE system_auth WITH REPLICATION =
  {'class' : 'NetworkTopologyStrategy', '<name of DC 1>' : <new RF>, '<name of DC 2>' : <new RF>};

For example:

ALTER KEYSPACE system_auth WITH REPLICATION =
  {'class' : 'NetworkTopologyStrategy', 'dc1' : 3, 'dc2' : 3};

The names of the DCs must match the datacenter names specified in the rack & DC configuration file: /etc/scylla/cassandra-rackdc.properties.

Procedure¶

For each Scylla node in the cluster, edit the /etc/scylla/scylla.yaml file to change the authenticator parameter from AllowAllAuthenticator to PasswordAuthenticator.
```
authenticator: PasswordAuthenticator
```

Restart Scylla.

sudo systemctl restart scylla-server
docker exec -it some-scylla supervisorctl restart scylla
(without restarting some-scylla container)

Start cqlsh with the default superuser username and password.
cqlsh -u cassandra -p cassandra
Warning

Before proceeding to the next step, we highly recommend creating a custom superuser to ensure security and prevent performance degradation. See Creating a Custom Superuser for instructions.
Run a repair on the system_auth keyspace on all the nodes in the cluster.
For example:
nodetool repair -pr system_auth

If you want to create users and roles, continue to Enable Authorization.

Additional Resources¶

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