An Introduction to Kerberos

Kerberos, a gold standard in security, provides users on a network access to services with single sign-on. Datastax has integrated DSE 3.0 into a Kerberos protected network. User principals represent the identity of a user on the system and are made up of three parts: primary/instance@realm. Cassandra also needs to know about the principals created. Each network service is given a service principal, which has its own principal for each instance running on different nodes/hosts. Kerberos provides authentication only (auth), authentication and data signing (auth-int), or authentication, data signing, and encryption (auth-conf).