Securing Apache Hive - part III

This is the third in a series of blog posts on securing Apache Hive. The first post looked at installing Apache Hive and doing some queries on data stored in HDFS. The second post looked at how to add authorization to the previous tutorial using Apache Ranger. In this post we will extend the authorization scenario by showing how Apache Ranger can be used to create policies to both mask and filter data returned in the Hive query.

1) Data-masking with Apache Ranger

As a pre-requisite to this tutorial, please follow the previous post to set up Apache Hive and to enforce an authorization policy for the user "alice" using Apache Ranger. Now let's imagine that we would like "alice" to be able to see the "counts", but not the actual words themselves. We can create a data-masking policy in Apache Ranger for this. Open a browser and log in at "http://localhost:6080" using "admin/admin" and click on the "cl1_hive" service that we have created in the previous tutorial.

Click on the "Masking" tab and add a new policy called "WordMaskingPolicy", for the "default" database, "words" table and "word" column. Under the mask conditions, add the user "alice" and choose the "Redact" masking option. Save the policy and wait for it to by synced over to Apache Hive:

Now try to login to beeline as "alice" and view the first five entries in the table:

• bin/beeline -u jdbc:hive2://localhost:10000 -n alice
• select * from words LIMIT 5;

You should see that the characters in the "word" column have been masked (replaced by "x"s).

2) Row-level filtering with Apache Ranger 

Now let's imagine that we are happy for "alice" to view the "words" in the table, but that we would like to restrict her to words that start with a "D". The previous "access" policy we created for her allows her to view all "words" in the table. We can do this by specifying a row-level filter policy. Click on the "Masking" tab in the UI and disable the policy we created in the previous section.

Now click on the "Row-level Filter" tab and create a new policy called "AliceFilterPolicy" on the "default" database, "words" table. Add a Row Filter condition for the user "alice" with row filter "word LIKE 'D%'". Save the policy and wait for it to by synced over to Apache Hive:

Now try to login to beeline as "alice" as above. "alice" can successfully retrieve all entries where the words start with "D", but no other entries via:

• select * from words where word like 'D%';