Authentication framework for Kerberos enabled hadoop clusters

Abstract

The corporate world is intensively thinking of how to process vast datasets efficiently and securely. Apache Hadoop, an open source framework serves this requirement. Most of the current Hadoop technologies use Kerberos Authentication to incorporate security aspect to Hadoop, which suffers from numerous security and performance issues. The reliance on authentication credentials, a single point of failure as well as a single point of vulnerability, the insider threat and time synchronization problem adds to the list. A comprehensive review of various authentication issues in Kerberos-enabled Hadoop Clusters is provided in this paper. This paper proposes an authentication framework for Hadoop that uses an enhanced One-time Password (OTP) that can solve all the identified problems. The simulation results in Riverbed Modeler proves that the proposed model performs as good as traditional Kerberos Authentication Mechanism. A comparative analysis with existing mechanisms is also presented to strengthen the claims of proposed method.