Proxy user - Superusers Acting On Behalf Of Other Users A superuser with username ‘super’ wants to submit job and access hdfs on behalf of a user joe. The superuser has kerberos credentials but user joe doesn’t have any. The tasks are required to run as user joe and any file accesses on namenode are required to be done as user joe. It is required that user joe can connect to the namenode or job tracker on a connection authenticated with super’s kerberos credentials. In other words super is impersonating the user joe. Some products such as Apache Oozie need this. Configurations You can configure proxy user using properties hadoop.proxyuser.$superuser.hosts along with either or both of hadoop.proxyuser.$superuser.groups and hadoop.proxyuser.$superuser.users. By specifying as below in core-site.xml, the superuser named super can connect only from host1 and host2 to impersonate a user belonging to group1 and group2. <property> <name>hadoop.proxyuser.super.hosts</name> <value>host1,host2</value> </property> <property> <name>hadoop.proxyuser.super.groups</name> <value>group1,group2</value> </property> If these configurations are not present, impersonation will not be allowed and connection will fail. If more lax security is preferred, the wildcard value * may be used to allow impersonation from any host or of any user. For example, by specifying as below in core-site.xml, user named oozie accessing from any host can impersonate any user belonging to any group. <property> <name>hadoop.proxyuser.oozie.hosts</name> <value>*</value> </property> <property> <name>hadoop.proxyuser.oozie.groups</name> <value>*</value> </property> More details in below Apache Documentation: https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.2/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-common/Superusers.html ... View more