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Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Guide [8.11] ›Set up Elasticsearch ›Configuring Elasticsearch

Auditing security settings

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Auditing security settings

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You can use audit logging to record security-related events, such as authentication failures, refused connections, and data-access events. In addition, changes via the APIs to the security configuration, such as creating, updating and removing native and built-in users, roles, role mappings and API keys are also recorded.

Audit logs are only available on certain subscription levels. For more information, see https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions.

If configured, auditing settings must be set on every node in the cluster. Static settings, such as xpack.security.audit.enabled, must be configured in elasticsearch.yml on each node. For dynamic auditing settings, use the cluster update settings API to ensure the setting is the same on all nodes.

General Auditing Settings

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xpack.security.audit.enabled

(Static) Set to true to enable auditing on the node. The default value is false. This puts the auditing events in a dedicated file named <clustername>_audit.json on each node.

If enabled, this setting must be configured in elasticsearch.yml on all nodes in the cluster.

Audited Event Settings

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The events and some other information about what gets logged can be controlled by using the following settings:

xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.include
(Dynamic) Specifies the kind of events to print in the auditing output. In addition, _all can be used to exhaustively audit all the events, but this is usually discouraged since it will get very verbose. The default list value contains: access_denied, access_granted, anonymous_access_denied, authentication_failed, connection_denied, tampered_request, run_as_denied, run_as_granted, security_config_change.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.exclude
(Dynamic) Excludes the specified kind of events from the include list. This is useful in the case where the events.include setting contains the special value _all. The default is the empty list.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.emit_request_body

(Dynamic) Specifies whether to include the full request body from REST requests as an attribute of certain kinds of audit events. This setting can be used to audit search queries.

The default value is false, so request bodies are not printed.

Be advised that sensitive data may be audited in plain text when including the request body in audit events, even though all the security APIs, such as those that change the user’s password, have the credentials filtered out when audited.

Local Node Info Settings

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xpack.security.audit.logfile.emit_node_name
(Dynamic) Specifies whether to include the node name as a field in each audit event. The default value is false.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.emit_node_host_address
(Dynamic) Specifies whether to include the node’s IP address as a field in each audit event. The default value is false.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.emit_node_host_name
(Dynamic) Specifies whether to include the node’s host name as a field in each audit event. The default value is false.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.emit_node_id
(Dynamic) Specifies whether to include the node id as a field in each audit event. Unlike node name, whose value might change if the administrator changes the setting in the config file, the node id will persist across cluster restarts and the administrator cannot change it. The default value is true.

Audit Logfile Event Ignore Policies

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The following settings affect the ignore policies that enable fine-grained control over which audit events are printed to the log file. All of the settings with the same policy name combine to form a single policy. If an event matches all the conditions of any policy, it is ignored and not printed. Most audit events are subject to the ignore policies. The sole exception are events of the security_config_change type, which cannot be filtered out, unless excluded altogether.

xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.ignore_filters.<policy_name>.users
(Dynamic) A list of user names or wildcards. The specified policy will not print audit events for users matching these values.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.ignore_filters.<policy_name>.realms
(Dynamic) A list of authentication realm names or wildcards. The specified policy will not print audit events for users in these realms.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.ignore_filters.<policy_name>.actions
(Dynamic) A list of action names or wildcards. Action name can be found in the action field of the audit event. The specified policy will not print audit events for actions matching these values.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.ignore_filters.<policy_name>.roles
(Dynamic) A list of role names or wildcards. The specified policy will not print audit events for users that have these roles. If the user has several roles, some of which are not covered by the policy, the policy will not cover this event.
xpack.security.audit.logfile.events.ignore_filters.<policy_name>.indices
(Dynamic) A list of index names or wildcards. The specified policy will not print audit events when all the indices in the event match these values. If the event concerns several indices, some of which are not covered by the policy, the policy will not cover this event.
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