Authentication, Authorization, and ACLs
Set up HTTP basic auth and ACLs for access to controller and broker
Apache Pinot 0.8.0+ comes out of the box with support for HTTP Basic Auth. While disabled by default for easier setup, authentication and authorization can be added to any environment simply via configuration. ACLs can be set on both API and table levels. This upgrade can be performed with zero downtime in any environment that provides replication.
For external access, Pinot exposes two primary APIs via the following components:
pinot-controller handles cluster management and configuration
pinot-broker handles incoming SQL queries
Both components can be protected via auth and even be configured independently. This makes it is possible to separate accounts for administrative functions such as table creation from accounts that are read the contents of tables in production.
Additionally, all other Pinot components such as pinot-server and pinot-minion can be configured to authenticate themselves to pinot-controller via the same mechanism. This can be done independently of (and in addition to) using 2-way TLS/SSL to ensure intra-cluster authentication on the lower networking layer.
Quickstart
If you'd rather dive directly into the action with an all-in-one running example, we provide an AuthQuickstart runnable with Apache Pinot. This sample app is preconfigured with the settings below but only intended as a dev-friendly, local, single-node deployment.
Tokens and User Credentials
The configuration of HTTP Basic Auth in Apache Pinot distinguishes between Tokens, which are typically provided to service accounts, and User Credentials, which can be used by a human to log onto the web UI or issue SQL queries. While we distinguish these two concepts in the configuration of HTTP Basic Auth, they are fully-convertible formats holding the same authentication information. This distinction allows us to support future token-based authentication methods not reliant on username and password pairs.
Currently, Tokens are merely base64-encoded username & password tuples, similar to those you can find in HTTP Authorization header values (e.g. see RFC 7617):
Authentication with Web UI and API
Apache Pinot's Basic Auth follows the established standards for HTTP Basic Auth. Credentials are provided via an HTTP Authorization header. The pinot-controller web ui dynamically adapts to your auth configuration and will display a login prompt when basic auth is enabled. Restricted users are still shown all available ui functions, but their operations will fail with an error message if ACLs prohibit access.
If you're using pinot's CLI clients you can provide your credentials either via dedicated username and password arguments, or as pre-serialized token for the HTTP Authorization header. Note, that while most of Apache Pinot's CLI commands support auth, not all of them have been back-fitted yet. If you encounter any such case, you can access the REST API directly, e.g. via curl.
Manual Token Setup
Before we can require authentication, we first have to distribute service tokens among all pinot nodes. Nodes use tokens to authenticate themselves as clients to other nodes. The simplest approach is to create a single internal admin token that is shared across all nodes. Alternatively, every group of components or even every single node can be provided their own token. All tokens live exclusively within a node's local configuration properties (which in turn also enable injection via environmental variables).
Here's an example of a simple shared admin credential with password verysecret. Note, that the same token is duplicated for different sub-components. While this causes verbosity in a simple scenario, it enables fine-grained control over which tokens are used for different purposes if needed.
Controller Authentication and Authorization
Pinot-controller has supported custom access control implementations for quite some time. We expanded the scope of this support in 0.8.0+ and added a default implementation for HTTP Basic Auth. Furthermore, the controller's web UI added support for user login workflows and graceful handling of authentication and authorization messages.
Controller Auth can be enabled via configuration in the controller properties. The configuration options allow the specification of usernames and passwords as well as optional ACL restrictions on a per-table and per-access-type (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE) basis.
The example below creates two users, admin with password verysecret and user with password secret. admin has full access, whereas user is restricted to READ operations and, additionally, to tables named myusertable, baseballStats, and stuff in all cases where the API calls are table-specific.
This configuration will automatically allow other pinot components to access pinot-controller with the shared admin service token set up earlier.
If *.principals.<user>.tablesis not configured, then all the tables are considered accessible for this <user>.
Broker Authentication and Authorization
Pinot-Broker, similar to pinot-controller above, has supported access control for a while now and we added a default implementation for HTTP Basic Auth. Since pinot-broker does not provide a web UI by itself, authentication is only relevant for SQL queries hitting the broker's REST API.
Broker Auth can be enabled via configuration in the broker properties, similar to the controller. The configuration options allow specification of usernames and passwords as well as optional ACL restrictions on a per-table table basis (access type is always READ). Note, that it is possible to configure a different set of users, credentials, and permissions for broker access. However, if you want a user to be able to access data via the query console on the controller web UI, that user must (a) share the same username and password on both controller and broker, and (b) have READ permissions and table-level access.
The example below again creates two users, admin with password verysecret and user with password secret. admin has full access, whereas user is restricted to tables named baseballStats and otherstuff.
Minion and ingestion jobs
Similar to any API calls, offline jobs executed via command line or minion require credentials as well if ACLs are enabled on pinot-controller. These credentials can be provided either as part of the job spec itself or using CLI arguments and as values (via -values) or properties (via -propertyFile) if Groovy templates are defined in the jobSpec.
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