On the 2015 Blackhat USA conference Ajit Gaddam gave a excellent talk on how to secure big data environments. Ajit is a CSA (Chief Security Architect) at VISA, and has been a co-author on the book Hadoop in Action.
Check out the talk in the video below.
In this talk he discusses 4 topics of securing big data environments
- What is Big Data and why should I secure it
- Security Risks & Threat Models
- Big Data Security Framework
- Successes, Failures, and Best Practices
The speaker has a focus on Hadoop and the importance of this data-platform. He emphasises on three reasons for Securing Hadoop
- Contains Sensitive Data
– Teams go from a POC to deploying a production cluster, and with it petabytes of data.
– Contains sensitive cardholder and other customer or corporate data that must be protected. - Subject to Regulatory Compliance
– With #1 comes compliance to PCI, DSS, FISMA, HIPAA, EU laws, US federal/ state laws to protect P11, cardholder, and other in-scope data - Can enable your business
– Before, usage was broad and possibly restrictive to non-sensitive data.
– With security in place, you can allow for sensitive workloads on restricted datasets