Aurora integrates with Apache Shiro to provide security controls for its API. In addition to providing some useful features out of the box, Shiro also allows Aurora cluster administrators to adapt the security system to their organization’s existing infrastructure.
There are two major components of security: authentication and authorization. A cluster administrator may choose the approach used for each, and may also implement custom mechanisms for either. Later sections describe the options available.
The scheduler must be configured with instructions for how to process authentication credentials at a minimum. There are currently two built-in authentication schemes - HTTP Basic Authentication, and SPNEGO (Kerberos).
Basic Authentication is a very quick way to add some security. It is supported by all major browsers and HTTP client libraries with minimal work. However, before relying on Basic Authentication you should be aware of the security considerations.
At a minimum you need to set 4 command-line flags on the scheduler:
-http_authentication_mechanism=BASIC
-shiro_realm_modules=INI_AUTHNZ
-shiro_ini_path=path/to/security.ini
And create a security.ini file like so:
[users]
sally = apple, admin
[roles]
admin = *
The details of the security.ini file are explained below. Note that this file contains plaintext, unhashed passwords.
To configure the client for HTTP Basic authentication, add an entry to ~/.netrc with your credentials
% cat ~/.netrc
# ...
machine aurora.example.com
login sally
password apple
# ...
No changes are required to clusters.json.
At a minimum you need to set 6 command-line flags on the scheduler:
-http_authentication_mechanism=NEGOTIATE
-shiro_realm_modules=KERBEROS5_AUTHN,INI_AUTHNZ
-kerberos_server_principal=HTTP/aurora.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM
-kerberos_server_keytab=path/to/aurora.example.com.keytab
-shiro_ini_path=path/to/security.ini
And create a security.ini file like so:
% cat path/to/security.ini
[users]
sally = _, admin
[roles]
admin = *
What’s going on here? First, Aurora must be configured to request Kerberos credentials when presented with an unauthenticated request. This is achieved by setting
-http_authentication_mechanism=NEGOTIATE
Next, a Realm module must be configured to authenticate the current request using the Kerberos credentials that were requested. Aurora ships with a realm module that can do this
-shiro_realm_modules=KERBEROS5_AUTHN[,...]
The Kerberos5Realm requires a keytab file and a server principal name. The principal name will usually
be in the form HTTP/aurora.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM.
-kerberos_server_principal=HTTP/aurora.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM
-kerberos_server_keytab=path/to/aurora.example.com.keytab
The Kerberos5 realm module is authentication-only. For scheduler security to work you must also enable a realm module that provides an Authorizer implementation. For example, to do this using the IniShiroRealmModule:
-shiro_realm_modules=KERBEROS5_AUTHN,INI_AUTHNZ
You can then configure authorization using a security.ini file as described below (the password field is ignored). You must configure the realm module with the path to this file:
-shiro_ini_path=path/to/security.ini
To use Kerberos on the client-side you must build Kerberos-enabled client binaries. Do this with
./pants binary src/main/python/apache/aurora/client/cli:kaurora
./pants binary src/main/python/apache/aurora/admin:kaurora_admin
You must also configure each cluster where you’ve enabled Kerberos on the scheduler
to use Kerberos authentication. Do this by setting auth_mechanism to KERBEROS
in clusters.json.
% cat ~/.aurora/clusters.json
{
"devcluser": {
"auth_mechanism": "KERBEROS",
...
},
...
}
Given a means to authenticate the entity a client claims they are, we need to define what privileges they have.
The simplest security configuration for Aurora is an INI file on the scheduler. For small clusters, or clusters where the users and access controls change relatively infrequently, this is likely the preferred approach. However you may want to avoid this approach if access permissions are rapidly changing, or if your access control information already exists in another system.
You can enable INI-based configuration with following scheduler command line arguments:
-http_authentication_mechanism=BASIC
-shiro_ini_path=path/to/security.ini
note As the argument name reveals, this is using Shiro’s IniRealm behind the scenes.
The INI file will contain two sections - users and roles. Here’s an example for what might be in security.ini:
[users]
sally = apple, admin
jim = 123456, accounting
becky = letmein, webapp
larry = 654321,accounting
steve = password
[roles]
admin = *
accounting = thrift.AuroraAdmin:setQuota
webapp = thrift.AuroraSchedulerManager:*:webapp
The users section defines user user credentials and the role(s) they are members of. These lines
are of the format <user> = <password>[, <role>...]. As you probably noticed, the passwords are
in plaintext and as a result read access to this file should be restricted.
In this configuration, each user has different privileges for actions in the cluster because of the roles they are a part of:
You might find documentation on the Internet suggesting there are additional sections in shiro.ini,
like [main] and [urls]. These are not supported by Aurora as it uses a different mechanism to configure
those parts of Shiro. Think of Aurora’s security.ini as a subset with only [users] and [roles] sections.
Since Aurora’s security is backed by Apache Shiro, you can implement a custom Realm to define organization-specific security behavior.
In addition to using Shiro’s standard APIs to implement a Realm you can link against Aurora to
access the type-safe Permissions Aurora uses. See the Javadoc for org.apache.aurora.scheduler.spi
for more information.
Package your custom Realm(s) with a Guice module that exposes a Set<Realm> multibinding.
package com.example;
import com.google.inject.AbstractModule;
import com.google.inject.multibindings.Multibinder;
import org.apache.shiro.realm.Realm;
public class MyRealmModule extends AbstractModule {
@Override
public void configure() {
Realm myRealm = new MyRealm();
Multibinder.newSetBinder(binder(), Realm.class).addBinding().toInstance(myRealm);
}
static class MyRealm implements Realm {
// Realm implementation.
}
}
To use your module in the scheduler, include it as a realm module based on its fully-qualified class name:
-shiro_realm_modules=KERBEROS5_AUTHN,INI_AUTHNZ,com.example.MyRealmModule
While the APIs and SPIs we ship with are stable as of 0.8.0, we are aware of several incremental improvements. Please follow, vote, or send patches.
Relevant tickets: * AURORA-343: HTTPS support * AURORA-1248: Client retries 4xx errors * AURORA-1279: Remove kerberos-specific build targets * AURORA-1293: Consider defining a JSON format in place of INI * AURORA-1179: Supported hashed passwords in security.ini * AURORA-1295: Support security for the ReadOnlyScheduler service