The operating system profile contains the operating system user name, service process variables, Hadoop impersonation properties, the Analyst Service properties, environment variables, and permissions.

To increase security, create operating system profiles to divide users into specific groups. Each group is defined by the operating system profile and the configured operating system user. The groups manage mapping runs and control access to directories by specifying permissions for the operating system user in each operating system profile. The operating system user has read and write permissions to certain controlled directories. The operating system profile configuration must adequately control the directories where users have read and write permissions in order to mitigate security attacks that can result due to directory traversal. For example, if the operating system profile does not properly assign directory permissions, certain users can access files in unassigned directories.

When you configure the Data Integration Service to use operating system profiles, the Data Integration Service runs jobs with the permissions of the operating system user that you define in the operating system profile. The operating system user must have access to the directories you configure in the profile and the directories the Data Integration Service accesses at run time.

By default, the Data Integration Service process runs all jobs, mappings, and workflows using the permissions of the operating system user that starts Informatica Services. The jobs have access only to the directories where the operating system user has read and write permissions. The Data Integration Service writes output files to a single shared location specified in the Data Integration Service execution options.

Before you run a mapping with a Lookup transformation, Sqoop source, or Sqoop target in the Hadoop run-time environment, verify that the operating system user has read, write, and execute permissions on the following directory:

<Informatica installation directory>/tomcat/temp/<Data Integration Service name>/temp