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 intended only as a dev-friendly, local, single-node deployment.

Apache Pinot 0.10.0+ includes built-in support for Enhanced HTTP Basic Auth using ZooKeeper. Although it is disabled by default for simplified setup, authentication and authorization can be easily added to any environment through configuration. ACLs (Access Control Lists) can be set for both API and table levels. This upgrade can be seamlessly performed in any environment without requiring replication, ensuring zero downtime.

The latest ZK Basic Auth offers the following features:

Set up 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 (RFC 7617).

This is best demonstrated by example of introducing ACLs with a simple admin + user setup. In order to enable authentication on a cluster without interrupting operations, we'll go these steps in sequence:

1. Create "admin" and "user" in the controller properties

2. Distribute service tokens to pinot's components

For simplicity, we'll reuse the admin credentials as service tokens. In a production environment, you'll keep them separate.

Restart the affected components for the configuration changes to take effect.

3. Enable ACL enforcement on the controller

After a controller restart, access to controller APIs requires authentication information (from internal components, external users, or the Web UI).

4. Create users and enable ACL enforcement on the broker

After restarting the broker, any access to broker APIs requires authentication information as well.

Congratulations! You've successfully enabled authentication on Apache Pinot. Read on to learn more about the details and advanced configuration options.

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.

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.

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.