Hi erwinx, Sounds interesting to me!
If your purposes are to research/a paper, I'm always a fan of spending some time to define the problem (something constrained to 2 pages would be good) you are trying to solve. I find it personally helpful to myself and it would help us greatly if you ask us for implementation advice! After that I'd following Joey's advice as an implementation avenue -- start hacking using the coprocessor interface. Does your goal also includes potential integration as part of HBase? The threat model sketch you are assuming sounds interesting. Up to this point, our threat model is roughly gives the attacker only the ability to make arbitrary rpcs, the ability to sniff client traffic, but also someone who does not have credentials to get to the underlying hdfs file system. There are a few related issues that may be related to what you are looking into on the bug/feature tracker. Here are some links to get started: It would be nice to frame what you are trying to solve in relation to those. :) https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-6222 Key value visibility tags. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-1697 DAC umbrella Jon. On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 5:29 AM, erwin x <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I am investigating how HBase can be used to store sensitive/confidential > information. > This research is part of my master thesis for computing science at a > university. > > The research involves mostly confidentiality, for example: > - Describing the location of the data within the distributed system > - Role based access control > - Fine grained access control (at column/row level) > - Build-in encryption based on the role > - The impact on performance and validation of the above security. > > My questions are: > > 1) are the above features interesting for HBase? > 2) should I propose my changes and results in the Jira of HBase? > > This research assumes that the data is so sensitive that even > administrators, developers or other malicious accessors may not see > the data unless they have an authorized role. > > If I observed correctly (correct me if I am wrong), security in HBase > now focuses primarily on authentication and discretionary access > control and assumes that no malicious user has access to the > underlying system, for example HDFS, hard drive or shell access because > data can still be read in that way. My research focuses on extending > HBase security with more authorization and confidentiality features. > > Thanks in advance! > > Kind regards, > erwinx > -- // Jonathan Hsieh (shay) // Software Engineer, Cloudera // [email protected]
