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Authorization is the process by where users are granted permissions, which entitle them to access or change data on specific keyspaces, tables, or an entire datacenter. Authorization for Scylla is done internally within Scylla and is not done with a third party such as LDAP or OAuth. Granting permissions to users requires the use of a role such as Database Administrator and requires a user who has been authenticated.
Authorization is enabled using the authorizer setting in scylla.yaml. Scylla has two authorizers available:
AllowAllAuthorizer (default setting) - which performs no checking and so effectively grants all permissions to all roles. This must be used if AllowAllAuthenticator is the configured authenticator.
CassandraAuthorizer - which implements permission management functionality and stores its data in Scylla system tables.
Note
Once Authorization is enabled, all users must:
Permissions are modeled as a whitelist, and as such, a given role has no access to any database resource, unless specified. The implication of this is that once authorization is enabled on a node, all requests will be rejected until the required permissions have been granted. For this reason, it is strongly recommended to perform the initial setup on a node that is not processing client requests.
The following assumes that Authentication has already been enabled via the process outlined in Enable Authentication. Perform these steps to enable internal authorization across the cluster:
Configure the authorizer as CassandraAuthorizer
Set your credentials as the superuser
Login to cqlsh as the superuser and set roles and privileges for your users
Confirm users can access the client with their new credentials.
Remove Cassandra default user / passwords
It is highly recommended to perform this action on a node that is not processing client requests.
Procedure
On the selected node, edit scylla.yaml to change the authorizer option to CassandraAuthorizer:
authorizer: CassandraAuthorizer
Restart the node. This will set the authorization.
sudo systemctl restart scylla-server
docker exec -it some-scylla supervisorctl restart scylla
(without restarting some-scylla container)
The default ScyllaDB superuser role is cassandra with password cassandra. Using the default
superuser is unsafe and may significantly impact performance.
If you haven’t created a custom superuser while enabling authentication, you should create a custom superuser before creating additional roles. See Creating a Custom Superuser for instructions.
Note
We recommend creating a custom superuser to improve security.
In order for the users on your system to be able to login and perform actions, you as the DBA will have to create roles and privileges.
Before you Begin Validate you have set the authenticator as described in Authentication. Validate you have the credentials for the superuser for your system for yourself.
Open a new cqlsh session using the credentials of a role with superuser credentials. For example:
cqlsh -u dba -p 39fksah!
Configure the appropriate access privileges for clients using GRANT PERMISSION statements. For additional examples, consult the RBAC example.
In this example, you are creating a user (db_user) who can access with password (password). You are also granting db_user with the role named client who has SELECT permissions on the ks.t1 table.
CREATE ROLE db_user WITH PASSWORD = 'password' AND LOGIN = true;
CREATE ROLE client;
GRANT SELECT ON ks.t1 TO client;
GRANT client TO db_user;
Continue in this manner to grant permissions for all users.
Restart Scylla. As each node restarts and clients reconnect, the enforcement of the granted permissions will begin.
sudo systemctl restart scylla-server
docker exec -it some-scylla supervisorctl restart scylla
(without restarting some-scylla container)
The following should be noted:
Clients are not able to connect until you setup roles as users with passwords using GRANT PERMISSION statements (using the superuser). Refer to the example in Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for details.
When initiating a connection, clients will need to use the user name and password that you assign
Confirm all clients can connect before removing the Cassandra default password and user.
To remove permission from any role or user, see REVOKE PERMISSION.
To prevent others from entering with the old superuser password, you can and should delete it.
DROP ROLE [ IF EXISTS ] 'old-username';
For example
DROP ROLE [ IF EXISTS ] 'cassandra';
Authorization - CQL Reference for authorizing users
Authentication - Enable Authentication
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