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

Configuring internal users and roles

Search Guard ships with an internal user database. You can use this user database if you do not have any external authentication system like LDAP or Active Directory in place. Users, their hashed passwords and roles are stored in the internal Search Guard configuration index on your cluster.

Internal users are configured in sg_internal_users.yml. You can find a template in <ES installation directory>/plugins/search-guard-5/sgconfig/sg_internal_users.yml

Syntax:

<username>:
  hash: <hashed password>
  roles:
    - <rolename>
    - <rolename>

Example:

admin:
  hash: $2a$12$xZOcnwYPYQ3zIadnlQIJ0eNhX1ngwMkTN.oMwkKxoGvDVPn4/6XtO
  roles:
    - readall
    - writeall

analyst:
  hash: $2a$12$ae4ycwzwvLtZxwZ82RmiEunBbIPiAmGZduBAjKN0TXdwQFtCwARz2
  roles:
    - readall

Note that the username cannot contain dots. If you need usernames with dots, use the username attribute:

<username>:
  username: username.with.dots
  hash: ...

Generating hashed passwords

The password hash is a salted BCrypt hash of the cleartext password. You can use the hash.sh script that is shipped with Search Guard to generate them:

plugins/search-guard-5/tools/hasher.sh -p mycleartextpassword

Configuration

In order to use the internal user database, set the authentication_backend to internal. For example, if you want to use HTTP Basic Authentication and the internal user database, the configuration looks like:

basic_internal_auth_domain:
  enabled: true
  order: 1
  http_authenticator:
    type: basic
    challenge: true
  authentication_backend:
    type: internal

Pre-defined users

Search Guard ships with the following pre-defined users:

Username	Password	Description
admin	admin	Full access to the cluster and all indices, but no access to the Search Guard configuration. Use an admin certificate for that.
kibanaserver	kibanaserver	Internal Kibana server user, for configuring elasticsearch.username and elasticsearch.password in kibana.yml. Has all permissions on the .kibana index.
kibanaro	kibanaro	Regular Kibana user, has READ access to all indices and all permissions on the .kibana index.
logstash	logstash	Logstash and Beats user, has CRUD and CREATE_INDEX permissions on all logstash and beats indices
readall	readall	Has read access to all indices