Securing Apache Hive - part II

This is the second post in a series of articles on securing Apache Hive. The first post looked at installing Apache Hive and doing some queries on data stored in HDFS. In this post we will show how to add authorization to the previous example using Apache Ranger.

1) Install the Apache Ranger Hive plugin

If you have not done so already, please follow the first post to install and configure Apache Hadoop and Apache Hive. Next download Apache Ranger and verify that the signature is valid and that the message digests match. Due to some bugs that were fixed for the installation process, I am using version 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT in this post. Now extract and build the source, and copy the resulting plugin to a location where you will configure and install it:

• mvn clean package assembly:assembly -DskipTests
• tar zxvf target/ranger-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-hive-plugin.tar.gz
• mv ranger-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-hive-plugin ${ranger.hive.home}

Now go to ${ranger.hive.home} and edit "install.properties". You need to specify the following properties:

• POLICY_MGR_URL: Set this to "http://localhost:6080"
• REPOSITORY_NAME: Set this to "cl1_hive".
• COMPONENT_INSTALL_DIR_NAME: The location of your Apache Hive installation

Save "install.properties" and install the plugin as root via "sudo -E ./enable-hive-plugin.sh". The Apache Ranger Hive plugin should now be successfully installed. Make sure that the default policy cache for the Hive plugin '/etc/ranger/cl1_hive/policycache' is readable by the user who is running the Hive server. Then restart the Apache Hive server to enable the authorization plugin.

2) Create authorization policies in the Apache Ranger Admin console

Next we will use the Apache Ranger admin console to create authorization policies for Apache Hive. Follow the steps in this tutorial to install the Apache Ranger admin service. Start the Ranger admin service via 'sudo ranger-admin start' and open a browser at 'http://localhost:6080', logging on with the credentials 'admin/admin'. Click the "+" button next to the "HIVE" logo and enter the following properties:

• Service Name: cl1_hive
• Username/Password: admin
• jdbc.url: jdbc:hive2://localhost:10000

Note that "Test Connection" won't work as the "admin" user will not have the necessary authorization to invoke on Hive at this point. Click "Add" to create the service. If you have not done so in a previous tutorial, click on "Settings" and then "Users/Groups" and add two new users called "alice" and "bob", who we will use to test authorization. Then go back to the newly created "cl1_hive" service, and click "Add new policy" with the following properties:

• Policy Name: SelectWords
• database: default
• table: words
• Hive column: *

Then under "Allow Conditions", give "alice" the "select" permission and click "Add".

3) Test authorization with Apache Hive

Once our new policy has synced to '/etc/ranger/cl1_hive/policycache' we can test authorization in Hive. The user 'alice' can query the table according to our policy:

• bin/beeline -u jdbc:hive2://localhost:10000 -n alice
• select * from words where word == 'Dare'; (works)

However, the user 'bob' is denied access:

• bin/beeline -u jdbc:hive2://localhost:10000 -n bob
• select * from words where word == 'Dare'; (fails)