Security production considerations

To secure your Kibana installation in production, consider these high-priority topics to ensure that only authorized users can access Kibana. For more information on Kibana’s security controls, see Configure security.

Enable SSL/TLS

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You should use SSL/TLS encryption to ensure that traffic between browsers and the Kibana server cannot be viewed or tampered with by third parties. See encrypt HTTP client communications for Kibana.

encrypt-kibana-http

Use Elastic Stack security features

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You can use Elastic Stack security features to control what Elasticsearch data users can access through Kibana.

When security features are enabled, Kibana users have to log in. They must have a role granting Kibana privileges and access to the indices that they will be working with in Kibana.

If a user loads a Kibana dashboard that accesses data in an index that they are not authorized to view, they get an error that indicates the index does not exist.

For more information on granting access to Kibana, see Granting access to Kibana.

Use secure HTTP headers

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The Kibana server can instruct browsers to enable additional security controls using HTTP headers.

Enable HTTP Strict-Transport-Security.

Use strictTransportSecurity to ensure that browsers will only attempt to access Kibana with SSL/TLS encryption. This is designed to prevent manipulator-in-the-middle attacks. To configure this with a lifetime of one year in your kibana.yml:
```
server.securityResponseHeaders.strictTransportSecurity: "max-age=31536000"
```
This header will block unencrypted connections for the entire domain. If you host more than one web application on the same domain using different ports or paths, all of them will be affected.
Disable embedding.

Use disableEmbedding to ensure that Kibana cannot be embedded in other websites. To configure this in your kibana.yml:
```
server.securityResponseHeaders.disableEmbedding: true
```

Require a Content Security Policy

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Kibana uses a Content Security Policy (CSP) to prevent the browser from allowing unsafe scripting, but older browsers will silently ignore this policy. If your organization does not need to support very old versions of our supported browsers, we recommend that you enable Kibana’s strict mode for the CSP. This will block access to Kibana for any browser that does not enforce even a rudimentary set of CSP protections.

To do this, set csp.strict to true in your kibana.yml:

csp.strict: true

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