Multi-user security¶

Without multi-user security, the regular behavior of DSS is to run as a single account on its host machine or connected Hadoop cluster. In the following documentation, dssuser will mean “the user account which is running the DSS service, or authorized to run Hadoop jobs”.

When a DSS end-user executes a code recipe, it runs as the UNIX dssuser. Similarly, when a DSS end-user executes an Hadoop recipe or notebook, it runs on the cluster as the Hadoop dssuser.

This causes two limitations:

• There is a lack of traceability on the Hadoop cluster to identify which user performed which action.
• If the DSS end-user is hostile and has the permission to execute “unsafe” code, he can run arbitrary code as UNIX dssuser and modify the DSS configuration

DSS supports an alternate mode of deployment, called multi-user security. In this mode, DSS will impersonate the end-user and run all user-controlled code under a different identity than dssuser.