Version: Search Guard 5 / This is an older version of Search Guard. Switch to Latest version

Client certificate based authentication

Search Guard can use a client TLS certificate in the HTTP request to authenticate users and assign roles and permissions.

Installation

Search Guard already ships with client certificate based authentication. No additional installation steps are required.

Configuration

In order for Search Guard to pick up client 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

The configuration for the client certificate authenticator is very minimal:

clientcert_auth_domain:
  enabled: false
  order: 1
  http_authenticator:
    type: clientcert
    config:
      username_attribute: cn
    challenge: false
  authentication_backend:
    type: noop

Name	Description
username_attribute	String, the part of the certificate’s DN that is used as username. If not specified, the complete DN is used.

Mapping DNs to roles

To map a certificate based user to a role, just use the username as specified by username_attribute in sg_roles_mapping.yml, for example:

sg_role_starfleet:
  users:
    - 'cn=ldaprole,ou=groups,dc=example,dc=com'
  backendroles:
    - ...
  hosts:
    - ...