Practical Kerberos

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Abstract

Kerberos is the system which underpins the vast majority of strong authentication across the Apache Hadoop application stack. Kerberos errors have brought many to their knees and it is often referred to as “black magic” or “the dark arts”; a long-standing joke that there are so few who understand how it works. This talk will cover the types of problems that Kerberos solves and doesn’t solve for Accumulo, decrypt some jargon on related libraries and technology that enable Kerberos authentication in Accumulo and Hadoop, and distill some basic takeaways designed to ease users in developing an application that can securely communicate with a “kerberized” Accumulo installation.

Speakers

Josh Elser

Staff Software Engineer, Hortonworks

Josh is a member of the engineering staff at Hortonworks. He is strong advocate for open source software, taking an active role in the Apache Software Foundation. Josh enjoys working on distributed system problems, and regularly contributes to many Apache projects, most frequently to Accumulo, Calcite, HBase, Phoenix, and Slider. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.