From version 5.0 onward, Shield is part of X-Pack. For more information, see Securing the Elastic Stack.
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Elastic Docs ›Shield [2.4] ›User Authentication

Enabling Anonymous Access

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Enabling Anonymous Access [1.1.0] Added in 1.1.0.

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The authentication process can be split into two phases - token extraction and user authentication. During the first phase (token extraction phase), the configured realms are requested to try and extract/resolve an authentication token from the incoming request. The first realm that finds an authentication token in the request "wins", meaning, the found authentication token will be used for authentication (moving to the second phase - user authentication - where each realm that support this authentication token type will try to authenticate the user).

In the event where no authentication token was resolved by any of the active realms, the incoming request is considered to be anonymous.

By default, anonymous requests are rejected and an authentication error is returned (status code 401). It is possible to change this behaviour and instruct Shield to associate an default/anonymous user with the anonymous request. This can be done by configuring the following settings in the elasticsearch.yml file:

shield.authc:
  anonymous:
    username: anonymous_user 
    roles: role1, role2 
    authz_exception: true

The username/principal of the anonymous user. This setting is optional and will be set to _es_anonymous_user by default when not configured.

The roles that will be associated with the anonymous user. This setting is mandatory - without it, anonymous access will be disabled (i.e. anonymous requests will be rejected and return an authentication error)

When true, a HTTP 403 response will be returned when the anonymous user does not have the appropriate permissions for the requested action. The web browser will not be prompt the user to provide credentials to access the requested resource. When set to false, a HTTP 401 will be returned allowing for credentials to be provided for a user with the appropriate permissions. If you are using anonymous access in combination with HTTP, setting this to false may be necessary if your client does not support preemptive basic authentication. This setting is optional and will be set to true by default.
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