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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8758?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13447676#comment-13447676
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Robert Joseph Evans commented on HADOOP-8758:
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One really nice use case that Daryn Sharp has talked a lot about is testing.
If you could easily replace Kerberos with a mock all of the unit tests can be
run with security enabled. There are a lot of security bugs that creep in
because we cannot test with security on all the time.
It also would allow us to use tokens when "security" is off. This would reduce
the number of code paths dramatically which in turn is will improve the
coverage of the unit tests. I don't know of many people that really will want
to replace Kerberos entirely in their grids some might, but at a minimum from a
testing and stability perspective it is very interesting.
> Support for pluggable token implementations
> -------------------------------------------
>
> Key: HADOOP-8758
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8758
> Project: Hadoop Common
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: ipc, security
> Reporter: Kan Zhang
> Assignee: Kan Zhang
>
> Variants of the delegation token mechanism have been employed by different
> Hadoop services (NN, JT, RM, etc) to re-authenticate a previously
> Kerberos-authenticated client. While existing delegation token mechanism
> compliments Kerberos well, it doesn't necessarily have to be coupled with
> Kerberos. In principle, delegation tokens can be coupled with any
> authentication mechanism that bootstraps security. In particular, it can be
> coupled with other token implementations that use the same DIGEST-MD5 auth
> method. For example, a token can be pre-generated in an out-of-band manner
> and configured as a shared secret key between NN and JT to allow JT to make
> initial authentication to NN. This simple example doesn't deal with token
> renewal etc, but it helps to illustrate the point that if we can support
> multiple pluggable token implementations, it opens up the possibility for
> different users to plug in the token implementation of their choice to
> bootstrap security. Such token based mechanism has advantages over Kerberos
> in that 1) it doesn't require Kerberos infrastructure, 2) it leverages
> existing SASL DIGEST-MD5 auth method and doesn't require adding a new RPC
> auth method.
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