Security limitations
editSecurity limitations
editPlugins
editElasticsearch’s plugin infrastructure is extremely flexible in terms of what can be extended. While it opens up Elasticsearch to a wide variety of (often custom) additional functionality, when it comes to security, this high extensibility level comes at a cost. We have no control over the third-party plugins' code (open source or not) and therefore we cannot guarantee their compliance with Elastic Stack security features. For this reason, third-party plugins are not officially supported on clusters with security features enabled.
Changes in wildcard behavior
editElasticsearch clusters with the security features enabled apply the /_all
wildcard, and all other wildcards, to the data streams, indices, and index aliases that the current user has
privileges for, not all data streams, indices, and index aliases on the cluster.
Multi document APIs
editMulti get and multi term vectors API throw IndexNotFoundException when trying to access non existing indices that the user is not authorized for. By doing that they leak information regarding the fact that the data stream or index doesn’t exist, while the user is not authorized to know anything about those data streams or indices.
Filtered index aliases
editAliases containing filters are not a secure way to restrict access to individual documents, due to the limitations described in Index and field names can be leaked when using aliases. The Elastic Stack security features provide a secure way to restrict access to documents through the document-level security feature.
Field and document level security limitations
editWhen a user’s role enables document or field level security for a data stream or index:
-
The user cannot perform write operations:
- The update API isn’t supported.
- Update requests included in bulk requests aren’t supported.
- The request cache is disabled for search requests.
When a user’s role enables document level security for a data stream or index:
- Document level security doesn’t affect global index statistics that relevancy scoring uses. This means that scores are computed without taking the role query into account. Documents that don’t match the role query are never returned.
-
The
has_child
andhas_parent
queries aren’t supported as query parameters in the role definition. Thehas_child
andhas_parent
queries can be used in the search API with document level security enabled. -
Date math expressions cannot contain
now
in range queries with date fields -
Any query that makes remote calls to fetch query data isn’t supported, including the following queries:
-
terms
query with terms lookup -
geo_shape
query with indexed shapes -
percolate
query
-
- If suggesters are specified and document level security is enabled, the specified suggesters are ignored.
- A search request cannot be profiled if document level security is enabled.
Index and field names can be leaked when using aliases
editCalling certain Elasticsearch APIs on an alias can potentially leak information
about indices that the user isn’t authorized to access. For example, when you get
the mappings for an alias with the _mapping
API, the response includes the
index name and mappings for each index that the alias applies to.
Until this limitation is addressed, avoid index and field names that contain confidential or sensitive information.
LDAP realm
editThe LDAP Realm does not currently support the discovery of nested
LDAP Groups. For example, if a user is a member of group_1
and group_1
is a
member of group_2
, only group_1
will be discovered. However, the
Active Directory Realm does support transitive
group membership.