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<h1>Apache Cassandra 4.1 Features: Client-side Password Hashing</h1>
<h3>May 26, 2022 | Berenguer Blasi</h3>
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<img src="../_images/blog/apache-cassandra-4.1-features-client-side-password-hashing-unsplash-jan-baborak.jpg" alt="Client-side password hashing">
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<div class="title">Image credit: <a href="https://unsplash.com/@janbaborak" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jan Baborák on Unsplash</a></div>
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<p>Apache Cassandra, just like any other database, needs users to connect. This means using a login and a password which up until recently would be provided as plain text.</p>
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<p>This has the potential to create security concerns as, for instance, audit logging could store the credentials in plain text. This problem also applied to any other system in Cassandra that might log data, bearing in mind that Apache Cassandra is an open source project and, therefore, it does not control all possible forks and implementations and what and how data is logged.</p>
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<p>The solution was to sanitize any logging for sensitive information, and this has been addressed recently. But that still left the door open to some corner cases where the detection or removal of such sensitive information could fail. There are also specific use cases, services and applications that might need to store a user’s credentials and up until 4.1, they would be storing that in plain text as well.</p>
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<p>To strengthen security, we wanted to avoid the use of plain-text credentials altogether, so <a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-17334" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CASSANDRA-17334</a> and the release of Apache Cassandra 4.1 will add the option to use client-side password hashes.</p>
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<div class="sect2">
<h3 id="new-hash-password-tool"><a class="anchor" href="#new-hash-password-tool"></a>New Hash Password Tool</h3>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>This feature introduces a new tool called <code>tools/bin/hash_password</code>. Here is an example:</p>
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<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre class="highlightjs highlight"><code class="language-asciidoc hljs" data-lang="asciidoc">$ tools/bin/hash_password -p mySecret
$2a$10$F5pRau9mKg5abP.DsuPQl.8rQpEoNm3OV91mKjb9vdKPUPejIPq/u</code></pre>
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<p>The tool is quite self-explanatory. It takes your plain-text secret and provides a <a href="https://www.mindrot.org/projects/jBCrypt/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">jBCrypt</a> hash that can be used in the DDL commands, e.g., to create or alter users/roles. For the moment only a Java version is available.</p>
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<div class="sect2">
<h3 id="example-usage-of-hash_password"><a class="anchor" href="#example-usage-of-hash_password"></a>Example Usage of Hash_Password</h3>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Let’s look at some examples of how we’d use the tool.</p>
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<p>Plain option:</p>
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<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre class="highlightjs highlight"><code class="language-asciidoc hljs" data-lang="asciidoc">CREATE ROLE role1
WITH LOGIN = true
AND PASSWORD = 'mySecret';</code></pre>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>New hashed option:</p>
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<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre class="highlightjs highlight"><code class="language-asciidoc hljs" data-lang="asciidoc">CREATE ROLE role1
WITH LOGIN = true
AND HASHED PASSWORD ‘$2a$10$F5pRau9mKg5abP.DsuPQl.8rQpEoNm3OV91mKjb9vdKPUPejIPq/u’;</code></pre>
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<p>As you can see we’re building the CQL with the hashed value of the password directly, i.e., this enables our applications to store the hash instead of the plain-text password. Also, any intermediate or third-party systems, additional logging or storing will deal with the hashes so the risk of accidental plain-text passwords leak is removed.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>The same applies to ALTER statements.</p>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>Plain option:</p>
</div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre class="highlightjs highlight"><code class="language-asciidoc hljs" data-lang="asciidoc">ALTER ROLE role1
WITH PASSWORD = '%s'</code></pre>
</div>
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<div class="paragraph">
<p>New hashed option:</p>
</div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content">
<pre class="highlightjs highlight"><code class="language-asciidoc hljs" data-lang="asciidoc">ALTER ROLE role1
WITH HASHED PASSWORD = '%s'</code></pre>
</div>
</div>
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<div class="sect2">
<h3 id="backward-compatibility"><a class="anchor" href="#backward-compatibility"></a>Backward Compatibility</h3>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>This feature is backward compatible so it will also work for CREATE/ALTER USER statements. On occasions where the built-in password obfuscation fails when logging data, this feature will only reveal the hash instead of the plain-text password.</p>
</div>
<div class="paragraph">
<p>Stay tuned for upcoming further security enhancements, such as <a href="https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-17501" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CASSANDRA-17501</a>.</p>
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