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Search Guard
Search Guard(®) is an Elasticsearch plugin that offers encryption, authentication, and authorization. It supports fine grained role-based access control to clusters, indices, documents and fields.
- Search Guard authenticates the credentials against the configured authentication backend(s).
- Search Guard authorizes the user by retrieving a list of the user’s roles from the configured authorization backend
TLS certificates
Search Guard relies heavily on the use of TLS, both for the REST and the transport layer of Elasticsearch. TLS is configured in the elasticsearch.yml file of Elasticsearch installation.
Following keys are used to configure location of keystore and truststore files.
Transport layer TLS
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| searchguard.ssl.transport.keystore_filepath | Path to the keystore file, relative to the config/ directory (mandatory) |
| searchguard.ssl.transport.keystore_password | Keystore password |
| searchguard.ssl.transport.truststore_filepath | Path to the truststore file, relative to the config/ directory (mandatory) |
| searchguard.ssl.transport.truststore_password | Truststore password |
REST layer TLS
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| searchguard.ssl.http.enabled | Whether to enable TLS on the REST layer or not |
| searchguard.ssl.http.keystore_filepath | Path to the keystore file, relative to the config/ directory (mandatory) |
| searchguard.ssl.http.keystore_password | Keystore password |
| searchguard.ssl.http.truststore_filepath | Path to the truststore file, relative to the config/ directory (mandatory) |
| searchguard.ssl.http.truststore_password | Truststore password |
Note: KubeDB Elasticsearch is configured with keystore and truststore files in JKS format
Configuring Admin certificates
Admin certificates are regular client certificates that have elevated rights to perform administrative tasks. You need an admin certificate to
change the Search Guard configuration via the sgadmin command line tool. Admin certificates are configured in elasticsearch.yml by simply stating their DN(s).
searchguard.authcz.admin_dn:
- CN=sgadmin, O=Elasticsearch Operator
Client authentication
With TLS client authentication enabled, REST clients can send a TLS certificate with the HTTP request to provide identity information to Search Guard.
- You can provide an admin certificate when using the REST API.
- You can provide Basic Auth with client certificates.
Note: Search Guard accepts TLS client certificates if they are sent, but does not enforce them.
Next Steps
- Learn how to create TLS certificates.
- Learn how to use TLS certificates to connect Elasticsearch.
- Learn how to generate search-guard configuration.
- Want to hack on KubeDB? Check our contribution guidelines.