Jon Morisi shows how to configure Knox to work with Active Directory:
I’ve recently been doing some work with Hadoop using the Hortonworks distribution. Most recently I configured Knox to integrate with Active Directory. The end goal was to be able to authenticate with Active Directory via Knox (a REST API Gateway) and then on to other services like Hive. I also configured Knox to point to Zookeeper (HA service discovery) vs. Hive directly, but that’s really more detail than we need for integrating Knox with AD.
The Knox documentation is really good and very helpful:
https://knox.apache.org/books/knox-0-9-0/user-guide.html
Worth the read if you’re putting together a Hadoop cluster.