Role Based Access Control In Cassandra

The upcoming 2.2 release of Cassandra aims to improve its permissions management by adding significant new functionality to the authentication and authorization subsystem. One major enhancement is the introduction of role-based access control (RBAC), which allows administrators to bundle related privileges together by granting them to roles, which can then be assigned to specific database users. This greatly simplifies permissions management for administrators and provides more flexibility in managing user access. The new RBAC system also supports inheritance of permissions from one role to another, allowing admins to create a deep structure of roles with fine-grained permissions without incurring a huge administrative burden. Additionally, the creator of a role is automatically granted permissions on it, enabling users with role-creation privileges to manage the roles they create.