Geode Integrated Security

Geode is introducing a security implementation which allows you to control the authentication/authorization of all Geode entities within one implementation. When Integrated Security is turned on, all client/server communications, peer to peer, gateway authentication, jmx operations, gfsh commands and Pulse are all protected with this single security mechanism.

1. No changes for existing implementations of Authentication/Authorization for client-server security

The API for Authenticator and AccessControl has not changed. Your implementations of those are still honored in client/server communication if you choose not to implement the new security interface. However, these two are deprecated now and will be removed in the future.

2. Introduction of security-manager configuration and SecurityManager interface for Integrated Security

To turn on integrated security, your will need to start your servers/locators with this property set in your gemfire.properties file:

security-manager = com.example.security.MySecurityManager

This property identifies the class name of the SecurityManager interface implementation. SecurityManager is the new interface you will need to implement for both authentication and authorization. Make sure your class has a zero argument constructor so that we can instantiate the object. See the SecurityManager javadoc for details. There is a SampleSecurityManager in the geode-core/src/main/java/org/apache/geode/security/templates directory that you can use as an example to write your own implementation.

3. Introduction of ResourcePermission

In SecurityManager, you will see that a ResourcePermission is passed in the authorization call. ResourcePermission is an object that defines the nature of the operation the Principal is trying to perform.

ResourcePermission is in one of those forms:

Resource:Operation
Resource:Operation:RegionName
Resource:Operation:RegionName:Key

All Resources are enumerated via the enum ResourcePermission.Resource, currently CLUSTER and DATA.

All Operations are enumerated via the enum ResourcePermission.Operation, which are MANAGE, READ, and WRITE. Note that MANAGE does not imply WRITE, and WRITE does not imply READ.

RegionName and Key are provided for those operations that are to be authorized based upon a region key access as well. For example, you can see a ResourcePermission defined as CLUSTER:READ, CLUSTER:MANAGE, DATA:READ, DATA:READ:regionA, or DATA:READ:regionA:key1.

Note that a ResourcePermission is hierarchical. If a principal has permission for DATA:READ, it automatically has data read permission on all regions and all keys. That is, it has permission for DATA:READ:regionA. Given permission for DATA:READ:regionA, the principal automatically has data read permission on all keys in regionA. That is, it has permission for DATA:READ:regionA:key1.

4. Introduction of PostProcessor

We completely redo the way we call post processing. Now the interface is a lot simpler. Before the value is sent to the you, it gets a pass through the post processor if there is any. You specify your post processor with this line in your gemfire.properties file:

security-post-processor = com.abc.security.MyPostProcessor

It is the class name that implements the PostProcessor interface. Make sure your class has a zero argument constructor so that we can instantiate the object. See PostProcessor javadoc for details. You can use SamplePostProcessor as an example to write your own implementation.

5. Operations and their corresponding GeodePermission

Below are the list of operations with their corresponding GeodePermission:

Client-Server Operations

GFSH Commands

Pulse

Pulse access is divided into two main categories, namely access to the Data Browser page and everything else.

The Data Browser page requires the permissions CLUSTER:READ and DATA:READ. Access to all other pages requires only CLUSTER:READ permission.

JMX Operations

• Page:
  Releasing Apache Geode
• Page:
  Running a Geode cluster in docker
• Page:
  Adding REST Cluster Management Operations
• Page:
  Creating a persistent cache service
• Page:
  Publishing Geode Metrics to External Monitoring Systems