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Securing Elasticsearch And Kibana

Vikash Selvin shows how to secure instances of Elasticsearch and Kibana:

The most popular options for securing Elasticsearch and Kibana are compared in the table below.

Shield is a security plugin developed by the same company that developed Elasticsearch. It allows you to easily protect this data with a username and password while simplifying your architecture. Advanced security features like encryption, role-based access control, IP filtering, and auditing are also available when you need them.

NGINX is an open source web server. It can act as a proxy server and can do load balancing, among other things. In combination with LUA and external scripts, it can be used for securing Elasticsearch and Kibana. We will be using this approach in this tutorial.

Searchguard is an open source alternative for Shield. It provides almost all the same functionalities as Shield, except for some features like LDAP authentication. However, these features are available in the paid variant.

Click through for a detailed NGINX setup.