Enable Users in YCQL

• YSQL
• YCQL
• YEDIS

YCQL authentication is based on roles. Roles can be created with superuser, non-superuser and login privileges. New roles can be created, and existing ones altered or dropped by administrators using YCQL commands.

1. Enable YCQL authentication

You can enable access control by starting the yb-tserver processes with the --use_cassandra_authentication=true flag. Your command should look similar to that shown below:

You can read more about bringing up the YB-TServers for a deployment in the section on manual deployment of a YugabyteDB cluster.

2. Connect with the default admin credentials

A new YugabyteDB cluster with authentication enabled comes up with a default admin user, the default username/password for this admin user is cassandra/cassandra. Note that this default user has SUPERUSER privilege. You can connect to this cluster using ycqlsh as follows:

You should see the cluster connect and the following prompt:

Connected to local cluster at 127.0.0.1:9042.
[ycqlsh 5.0.1 | Cassandra 3.9-SNAPSHOT | CQL spec 3.4.2 | Native protocol v4]
Use HELP for help.
cassandra@ycqlsh>

3. Create a new user

Use the CREATE ROLE command to create a new role. Users are roles that have the LOGIN privilege granted to them. Roles created with the SUPERUSER option in addition to the LOGIN option have full access to the database. Superusers can run all the YCQL commands on any of the database resources.

NOTE: By default, creating a role does not grant the LOGIN or the SUPERUSER privileges, these need to be explicitly granted.

Creating a user

For example, to create a regular user john with the password PasswdForJohn and grant login privileges, run the following command.

If the role john already existed, the above statement will not error out since you have added the IF NOT EXISTS clause. To verify the user account just created, run the following query:

You should see the following output.

 role      | can_login | is_superuser | member_of
-----------+-----------+--------------+-----------
      john |      True |        False |          []
 cassandra |      True |         True |          []

(2 rows)

Creating a superuser

The SUPERUSER status should be given only to a limited number of users. Applications should generally not access the database using an account that has the superuser privilege.

NOTE Only a role with the SUPERUSER privilege can create a new role with the SUPERUSER privilege, or grant it to an existing role.

To create a superuser admin with the LOGIN privilege, run the following command using a superuser account:

To verify the admin account just created, run the following query.

You should see the following output.

 role      | can_login | is_superuser | member_of
-----------+-----------+--------------+-----------
     admin |      True |         True |          []
      john |      True |        False |          []
 cassandra |      True |         True |          []

(3 rows)

4. Connect to ycqlsh using non-default credentials

You can connect to a YCQL cluster with authentication enabled as follows:

Alternatively, you can omit the -p <password> above and you will be prompted for a password.

As an example of connecting as a user, you can login with the credentials of the user john that you created above by running the following command and entering the password when prompted:

As an example of connecting as the admin user, you can run the following command.

5. Edit user accounts

You can edit existing user accounts using the ALTER ROLE statement. Note that the role making these changes should have sufficient privileges to modify the target role.

Changing password for a user

To change the password for john above, you can do:

Granting and removing superuser privileges

In the example above, you can verify that john is not a superuser:

 role | can_login | is_superuser | member_of
------+-----------+--------------+-----------
 john |      True |        False |          []

(1 rows)

To grant superuser privileges to john, run the following command.

We can now verify that john is now a superuser.

 role | can_login | is_superuser | member_of
------+-----------+--------------+-----------
 john |      True |         True |          []

(1 rows)

Similarly, you can revoke superuser privileges by running:

Enable and disable login privileges

In the example above, you can verify that john is can login to the database by doing the following:

 role | can_login | is_superuser | member_of
------+-----------+--------------+-----------
 john |      True |        False |          []

(1 rows)

To disable login privileges for john, run the following command.

You can verify this as follows.

 role | can_login | is_superuser | member_of
------+-----------+--------------+-----------
 john |     False |        False |          []

(1 rows)

Trying to login as john using ycqlsh will throw the following error.

To re-enable login privileges for john, run the following command.

6. Change default admin credentials

It is highly recommended to change at least the default password for the superadmin user in real world deployments to keep the database cluster secure.

As an example, let us say you want to change the cassandra user's password from cassandra to new_password. You can do that as follows:

Connecting to the cluster with the default password would no longer work:

$ bin/ycqlsh -u cassandra -p cassandra
Connection error:
  ... Provided username 'cassandra' and/or password are incorrect ...

You can now connect to the cluster using the new password:

7. Deleting a user

You can delete a user with the DROP ROLE command.

For example, to drop the user john in the above example, run the following command as a superuser:

You can verify that the john role was dropped as follows:

 role      | can_login | is_superuser | member_of
-----------+-----------+--------------+-----------
     admin |      True |         True |          []
 cassandra |      True |         True |          []

(2 rows)