Setting Up Field and Document Level Security

You can control access to data within an index by adding field and document level security permissions to a role. Field level security permissions restrict access to particular fields within a document. Document level security permissions restrict access to particular documents within an index.

Field and document level permissions are specified separately, but a role can define both field and document level permissions. Field and document level security permissions can be configured on a per-index basis.

Document and field level security is currently meant to operate with read-only privileged accounts. Users with document and field level security enabled for an index should not perform write operations.

Field Level Security

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To enable field level security, you specify the fields that each role can access in the roles.yml file. You list the allowed fields with the fields option. Fields are associated with a particular index or index pattern and operate in conjunction with the privileges specified for the indices.

<role_name>:
  indices:
    <index_permission_expression>:
      privileges: <privileges>
      fields:
        - <allowed_field_1>
        - <allowed_field_2>
        - <allowed_field_N>

To allow access to the _all meta field, you must explicitly list it as an allowed field. Access to the following meta fields is always allowed: _id, _type, _parent, _routing, _timestamp, _ttl, _size and _index. If you specify an empty list of fields, only these meta fields are accessible.

Omitting the fields entry entirely disables field-level security.

For example, the following customer_care role grants read access to six fields in any index:

customer_care:
  indices:
    '*':
      privileges: read
      fields:
        - issue_id
        - description
        - customer_handle
        - customer_email
        - customer_address
        - customer_phone

Also wildcard field expressions can be added to the fields options in the roles.yml file. For example the following example has the same effect as the previous example:

customer_care:
  indices:
    '*':
      privileges: read
      fields:
        - issue_id
        - description
        - 'customer_*'

If documents are more complex and contain json objects then the fields with dot notion should be used.

Assume the following document:

{
  "customer": {
    "handle": "Jim",
    "email": "jim@mycompany.com",
    "phone": "555-555-5555"
  }
}

If only access to the handle field is allowed then the following role should be setup:

my_role:
  indices:
    '*':
      privileges: read
      fields:
        - customer.handle

If access to the entire customer object is allowed then the wildcard dot notation can be used to make this easier:

my_role:
  indices:
    '*':
      privileges: read
      fields:
        - customer.*

Document Level Security

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Enabling document level security restricts which documents can be accessed from any document based API. To enable document level security, you use a query to specify the documents that each role can access in the roles.yml file. You specify the document query with the query option. The document query is associated with a particular index or index pattern and operates in conjunction with the privileges specified for the indices.

<role_name>:
  indices:
    <index_permission_expression>:
      privileges: <privileges>
      query:
        <query>

Omitting the query entry entirely disables document-level security.

The query should follow the same format as if a query was defined in the request body of a search request, but here the format is YAML. Any query from the query-dsl can be defined in the query entry.

For example, the following customer_care role grants read access to all indices, but restricts access to documents whose department_id equals 12.

customer_care:
  indices:
    '*':
      privileges: read
      query:
        term:
         department_id: 12

Alternatively the query can also be defined in JSON as a string. This makes it easier to define queries that already have been defined in the JSON body of search request body elsewhere.

customer_care:
  indices:
    '*':
      privileges: read
      query: '{"term" : {"department_id" : "12"}}''

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