REST management API
Content
This module adds the capability of managing users, roles, roles mapping and action groups via a REST Api. It is required if you plan to use the Kibana config GUI.
Access control
Since the REST management API makes it possible to change users, roles and permissions, access to this functionality is restricted by Search Guard. Access is granted either by a user’s role or by providing an admin certificate.
Role-based access control
All roles that should have access to the API must be configured in elasticsearch.yml with the following key:
searchguard.restapi.roles_enabled: ["SGS_ALL_ACCESS", ...]
This will grant full access permission to the REST API for all users that have the Search Guard role SGS_ALL_ACCESS.
You can further limit access to certain API endpoints and methods on a per role basis. For example, you can give a user permission to retrieve role information, but not to change or delete it.
The structure of the respective configuration is:
searchguard.restapi.endpoints_disabled.<role>.<endpoint>: ["<method>",...]
For example:
searchguard.restapi.endpoints_disabled.SGS_ALL_ACCESS.ROLES: ["PUT", "POST", "DELETE"]
Possible values for endpoint are:
ACTIONGROUPS
ROLES
ROLESMAPPING
INTERNALUSERS
TENANTS
SGCONFIG
CACHE
LICENSE
SYSTEMINFO
Possible values for then method are:
GET
PUT
POST
DELETE
You can also disable endpoints and methods for all users by using global as role name:
searchguard.restapi.endpoints_disabled.global.<endpoint>: ["<method>",...]
Admin certificate access control
Access can also be granted by using an admin certificate. This is the same certificate that you use when executing sgctl.
In order for Search Guard to pick up this certificate on the REST layer, you need to set the clientauth_mode in elasticsearch.yml to either OPTIONAL or REQUIRE:
searchguard.ssl.http.clientauth_mode: OPTIONAL
For curl, you need to specify the admin certificate with its complete certificate chain, and also the key:
curl --insecure --cert chain.pem --key kirk.key.pem "<API Endpoint>"
If you use the example PKI scripts provided by Search Guard SSL, the kirk.key.pem is already generated for you. You can generate the chain file by cating the certificate and the ca chain file:
cd search-guard-sll
cat example-pki-scripts/kirk.crt.pem example-pki-scripts/ca/chain-ca.pem > chain.pem
Fixing curl issues
If you experience problems with curl commands see Fixing curl first before reporting any issues.