Version: 7.x-47.0.0
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Configuring authentication and authorization

Search Guard comes with pluggable authentication and authorization modules. Depending on your use case and infrastructure, you can use one or multiple authentication and authorization modules like:

The main configuration file for authentication and authorization modules is sg_config.yml. It defines how Search Guard retrieves the user credentials, how it verifies these credentials, and how additional user roles are fetched from backend systems (optional).

It has three main parts:

---
_sg_meta:
  type: "config"
  config_version: 2

sg_config:
  dynamic:
    http:
      ...
    authc:
      ...
    authz:
      ...

HTTP

The http section has the following format:

anonymous_auth_enabled: <true|false>
xff: # non mandatory section
  enabled: <true|false>
  internalProxies: <string> # Regex pattern
  remoteIpHeader: <string> # Name of the header in which to look. Typically: x-forwarded-for
  proxiesHeader: <string>
  trustedProxies: <string> # Regex pattern

Authentication

The authc section has the following format:

<name>:
  http_enabled: <true|false>
  transport_enabled: <true|false>
  enabled_only_for_hosts: <array of netmasks>
  order: <integer>
    http_authenticator:
      ...
    authentication_backend:
      ...

An entry in the authc section is called an authentication domain. It specifies where to get the user credentials from, and against which backend they should be authenticated.

You can use more than one authentication domain. Each authentication domain has a freely selectable name (e.g. basic_auth_internal), enabled flags and an order. This makes it possible to chain authentication domains together. Search Guard will execute them in the order provided. If the user could be authenticated by a domain, the rest of the chain is skipped, so “first one wins”.

You can enable or disable an authentication domain for HTTP/REST and transport independently. This is for example useful if you want to use different authentication methods for TransportClients.

HTTP Authenticator

The http_authenticator specifies which authentication method you want to use on the HTTP layer.

The syntax for defining an authenticator on the HTTP layer is:

http_authenticator:
  type: <type>
  challenge: <true|false>
  config:
    ...

Allowed values for type are:

  • basic
  • kerberos
  • jwt
  • openid
  • saml
  • proxy
    • Use an external, proxy based authentication. Additional, proxy-specific configuration is needed, and the “X-forwarded-for” module has to be enabled as well. See Proxy authentication for further details.
  • clientcert
    • Authentication via a client TLS certificate. This certificate must be trusted by one of the Root CAs in the truststore of your nodes.

Authentication Backend

After the HTTP authenticator was executed, you need to specify against which backend system you want to authenticate the user. This is specified in the authentication_backend section and has the following format:

authentication_backend:
  type: <type>
  config:
    ...

Possible vales for type are:

  • noop
    • This means that no further authentication against any backend system is performed. Use noop if the HTTP authenticator has already authenticated the user completely, as in the case of JWT, Kerberos, Proxy or Client certificate authentication.
  • internal
    • use the users and roles defined in sg_internal_users for authentication.
  • ldap

Authorization

After the user has been authenticated, Search Guard can optionally collect additional user roles from backend systems. The authorization configuration has the following format:

authz:
  <name>:
    http_enabled: <true|false>
    transport_enabled: <true|false>
    authorization_backend:
      type: <type>
      config:
        ...

You can also define multiple entries in this section the same way as you can for authentication entries. The execution order is not relevant here, hence there is no order field.

Possible vales for type are:

  • noop
    • Used for skipping this step altogether
  • ldap

Examples

The sg_config.yml that ships with Search Guard contains configuration examples for all support modules. Use these examples as a starting point and customize them to your needs.

Advanced Configuration

Exclude certain users from authentication/authorization

It is possible to exclude users from authentication and/or authorization by specifying a ‘skip_users’ section inside the domain (root-level) configuration. Wildcards and regular expressions are supported.

This could be useful if fetching roles, let’s say from a LDAP server, for a specific user wouldn’t make sense since we know in advance that a user might not have any roles defined, e.g. Kibana user, thus saving unnecessary network round trips and reducing request latency.

authc:
  my_auth_domain_using_skip_users:
    type: ...
    http_enabled: true
    skip_users:
    - kibanaserver
    - 'cn=Michael Jackson,ou*people,o=TEST'
    - '/\S*/'

Limiting authentication domains to certain sub-nets only

Using the enabled_only_for_ips attribute you are able to restrict usage of the auth domain only to certain IPs or subnets. The option expects a list which can contain any of these values:

  • Single IPv4 addresses, e.g. 192.168.123.123
  • Single IPv6 addresses, e.g. 2001:db8::8a2e:370:7334
  • IPv4 subnets in CIDR notation, e.g. 192.0.2.0/24
  • IPv6 subnets in CIDR notation, e.g. 2001:db8::/32

This can be for example useful if the only reason to enable HTTP basic authentication is your Kibana installation. Then, you can limit the auth domain to the IPs used by Kibana.

Example:

authc:
  my_auth_domain_using_only_for_internal_hosts:
    type: ...
    http_enabled: true
    enabled_only_for_ips:
    - '192.0.2.0/24'


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