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The default authorization model of Hive supports a traditional RDBMS style of authorization based on users, groups and roles and granting them permissions to do operations on database or table. It is described in more detail in Hive Authorization and Hive Default Authorization - Legacy Mode.

This RDBMS style of authorization is not very suitable for the typical use cases in Hadoop because of the following differences in implementation:

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In Hive, when a file system is used for storage, there is a directory corresponding to a database or a table. With this authorization model, the read/write permissions a user or group has for this directory determine the permissions a user has on the database or table. In the case of other storage systems such as HBase, the authorization of equivalent entities in the system will be done using the system’s authorization mechanism to determine the permissions in Hive.

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The implementation of the file-system based authorization model is available through an authorization provider called StorageBasedAuthorizationProvider that is part of Hive. (Support for this was added to the Hive package in release 0.10.0 – see HIVE-3705 and and Storage Based Authorization in the Metastore Server Security in the Hive documentation.)

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