Securing Communication

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

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

	The username to use for authenticating to Elasticsearch.
	The password to use for authenticating to Elasticsearch.
	This setting enables the HTTPS protocol.
	The IP and port of the Elasticsearch nodes.

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.

Topbeat 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 Topbeat uses the list of trusted certificate authorities from the operating system where Topbeat is running. You can configure a Beat to use a specific list of CA certificates instead of the list from the OS. Here is an example:

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

The list of CA certificates to trust

For any given connection, the SSL/TLS certificates must have a subject that matches the value specified for hosts, or the TLS handshake fails. For example, if you specify hosts: ["foobar:9200"], the certificate MUST include foobar in the subject (CN=foobar) or as a subject alternative name (SAN). Make sure the hostname resolves to the correct IP address. If no DNS is available, then you can associate the IP address with your hostname in /etc/hosts (on Unix) or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (on Windows).

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