Authentication and Authorization - Learning Apache Cassandra - page 288

Authentication, authorization, and fault tolerance
Using the PasswordAuthenticator and CassandraAuthorizer strategies for
authentication and authorization respectively, user credentials and granted permissions are
stored in Cassandra itself. This means that, if the authentication data becomes unavailable,
no clients will be able to access the cluster. For that reason, you will always want to set the
replication factor for your system_auth keyspace to the total number of nodes in your
cluster. Since our development cluster consists of only a single node, we don't need to
make any changes; in production, however, you will almost certainly have many nodes in
your cluster, and you'll want to make sure credentials and permissions are stored locally on
every one of them.
Note
For further information on configuring Cassandra authentication, including best practices
when configuring authentication in a production cluster, see the DataStax Cassandra docu-
mentation at http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/security/se-
curity_config_native_authenticate_t.html .
For more information on configuring authorization, see http://www.datastax.com/docu-
mentation/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/security/secure_config_native_authorize_t.html .