I was a bit surprised to find out about the case where there is a behavioral change in trying to read from tables that the user do not have table/cf level permission.
Previous to cell-level-acls, trying to read from a table without R priv would result in an AccessDeniedException: 0.94: hbase(main):002:0> scan 't1' ROW COLUMN+CELL ERROR: org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.AccessDeniedException: org.apache.hadoop.hbase.security.AccessDeniedException: Insufficient permissions for user 'hdfs' for scanner open on table t1 However, 0.98 results in get / scan not seeing the data (because of the injected AccessContolFilter) and returning as if there was no data: 0.98: hbase(main):002:0> scan 'table1' ROW COLUMN+CELL 0 row(s) in 0.0320 seconds Also this behavioral change is applicable to the audit log as well, we no longer mark the access granted / denied requests for gets and scans in the audit log which is concerning. >From the lsat paragraph in https://blogs.apache.org/hbase/entry/hbase_cell_security, Andrew states that there are two modes now, check cell first or not (Query.setACLStrategy()). However, my understanding was that the default behavior should check table first, and then not do the scan at all if that is denied. From the code TableAuthManager.authorize(), it does not look to be the case. My questions are: 1) This is a behavioral change, and changes the default behavior as well regardless of whether cell level security is used or not. Should we revert back to the original behavior? 2) Even if we do not revert, should we record get / scans in the audit log ? 3) Are we targeting two use cases (a) user do not have table level auth, but selectively have cell level access, and (b) user do have table level auth but selectively NOT have cell level access? For these two use cases, should the strategy be a table level property rather than an per-op property ? Enis
