Cell security in Apache HBase

For some time Apache HBase has offered a strong security model based on Kerberos authentication and access control lists (ACLs). When Yahoo first made a version of Hadoop capable of strong authentication available in 2009, my team and I at a former employer, a commercial computer security vendor, were very interested. We needed a scale out platform for distributed computation, but we also needed one that could provide assurance against access of information by unauthorized users or applications.