Securing Communication With Elasticsearch

To secure the communication between Packetbeat and Elasticsearch, you can use HTTPS and basic authentication. Here is a sample configuration:

elasticsearch:
  username: packetbeat 
  password: verysecret 
  protocol: https 
  hosts: ["elasticsearch.example.com:9200"] 

Elasticsearch doesn’t have built-in basic authentication, but you can achieve it either by using a web proxy or by using the Shield commercial plugin.

Packetbeat verifies the validity of the server certificates and only accepts trusted certificates. Creating a correct SSL/TLS infrastructure is outside the scope of this document, but a good guide to follow is the Setting Up a Certificate Authority appendix from the Shield guide.

By default Packetbeat uses the list of trusted certificate authorities from the operating system where Packetbeat is running. You can configure Packetbeat to use a specific list of CA certificates instead of the list from the OS. You can also configure it to use client authentication by specifying the certificate and key to use when the server requires the Beat to authenticate. Here is an example configuration:

elasticsearch:
  username: packetbeat
  password: verysecret
  protocol: https
  hosts: ["elasticsearch.example.com:9200"]
  tls:
    certificate_authorities: 
      - /etc/pki/my_root_ca.pem
      - /etc/pki/my_other_ca.pem
    certificate: "/etc/pki/client.pem" 
    certificate_key: "/etc/pki/key.pem"