---
title: Authentication
description: Elastic Cloud uses API keys to authenticate users against its API. Additionally, it supports the usage of JWT to validate authenticated clients. The preferred...
url: https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/ecctl/ecctl-authentication
products:
  - Elastic Cloud Control
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Hosted: Generally available
  - Elastic Cloud Enterprise: Generally available
---

# Authentication
Elastic Cloud uses API keys to authenticate users against its API. Additionally, it supports the usage of [JWT](https://jwt.io/) to validate authenticated clients. The preferred authentication method is API keys.
There are two ways to authenticate against the Elastic Cloud or Elastic Cloud Enterprise APIs in ecctl:
- By specifying an API key using the `--api-key` flag
- By specifying the `--user` and `--pass` flags

The first method requires the user to already have an API key, if this is the case, all the outgoing API requests will use an Authentication API key header.
The second method uses the `user` and `pass` values to obtain a valid JWT token, that token is then used as the Authentication Bearer header for every API call. A goroutine that refreshes the token every minute is started, so that the token doesn’t expire while we’re performing actions.