Expose the high performance HTTP server embedded in Elasticsearch directly to the public, safely blocking any attempt to delete or modify your data.

In other words... no more proxies! Yay Ponies!

Replace the ES version with the one you have:

bin/plugin install https://github.com/sscarduzio/elasticsearch-readonlyrest-plugin/raw/master/download/elasticsearch-readonlyrest-v1.7_es-v2.2.1.zip

Append either of these snippets to conf/elasticsearch.yml

USE CASE 1: Full access from localhost + RO Access just to catalogue- indices*

readonlyrest:
    enable: true
    response_if_req_forbidden: Sorry, your request is forbidden.
    access_control_rules:

    - name: Accept all requests from localhost
      type: allow
      hosts: [127.0.0.1]
    
    - name: Just certain indices, and read only
      type: allow
      actions: [cluster:*, indices:data/read/*]
      indices: [product_catalogue-*] # index aliases are taken in account!

USE CASE 2: Authenticated users in Kibana (various permission levels)

readonlyrest:
    enable: true
    response_if_req_forbidden: <h1>Forbidden</h1>    
    access_control_rules:

    - name: Salesmen (read only)
      type: allow
      kibana_access: ro
      auth_key: sales:passwd1

    - name: Managers (read only, but can create dashboards)
      type: allow
      kibana_access: ro+
      auth_key: manager:passwd2
    
    - name: Admin (read write)
      type: allow
      kibana_access: rw
      auth_key: admin:passwd3

For other use cases and finer access control have a look at the full list of supported rules

2016-02-21 🆕 v1.9.1:

• kibana_access support access control for Kibana dashboards in "ro|rw|ro+" modes.
• kibana_indices if you customize the kibana.index property in kibana.yml let us know so kibana_access works as it should.
• actions rule lets you control what kind of actions are allowed/forbidden. I.e. [cluster:*, indices:data:*]
• indices rule now supports wildcards i.e. the word logstash-* will match itself, but also logstash-2016-04-02

2016-02-21 🆕 v1.8: indices rule now resolves index aliases.

2016-02-21 🆕 v1.7: real (multi)index isolation is now possible through indices rule (supersedes uri_re).

2016-02-20 🆕 v1.6: show login prompt in browsers if auth_key is configured.

2015-12-19 🆕 v1.5: support for X-Forwarded-For, HTTP Basic Authentication, and X-API-Key.

• v1.9.1 for Elasticsearch 2.3.1 elasticsearch-readonlyrest-v1.9.1_es-v2.3.1.zip

• v1.9.1 for Elasticsearch 2.3.0 elasticsearch-readonlyrest-v1.9.1_es-v2.3.0.zip

• v1.9.1 for Elasticsearch 2.2.* is not recommended because of a bug in ES

Plugin releases for earlier versions of Elasticsearch (may not include all the features) are available in the download folder.

** If you need a build for a specific ES version, open an issue and you'll get it. **

Other security plugins are replacing the high performance, Netty based, embedded REST API of Elasticsearch with Tomcat, Jetty or other cumbersome XML based JEE madness.

This plugin instead is just a lightweight HTTP request filtering layer.

Some suggest to spin up a new HTTP proxy (Varnish, NGNix, HAProxy) between ES and clients to prevent malicious access. This is a bad idea for two reasons:

• You're introducing more moving parts, your architecure gains complexity.
• Reasoning about security at HTTP level is risky and less granular controlling access at the internal ES protocol level.

The only clean way to do the access control is AFTER ElasticSearch has parsed the queries.

Just set a few rules with this plugin and confidently open for the external world.

Build your ACL from simple building blocks (rules) i.e.:

• hosts a list of origin IP addresses or subnets

• api_keys a list of api keys passed in via header X-Api-Key
• methods a list of HTTP methods
• accept_x-forwarded-for_header interpret the X-Forwarded-For header as origin host (useful for AWS ELB and other reverse proxies)
• auth_key HTTP Basic auth.

• indices indices (aliases and wildcards work)
• actions list of ES actions (e.g. "cluster:" , "indices:data/write/", "indices:data/read*")

• kibana_access captures the read-only, read-only + new visualizations/dashboards, read-write use cases of Kibana.

See the (full list of supported rules)[Supported-Rules] for more info on how to use them.

Optionally provide a string to be returned as the body of 403 (FORBIDDEN) HTTP response. If not provided, the descriptive "name" field of the matched block will be shown (good for debug!).

• List of ACL block rules supported
• List of Actions and their meaning

This project was incepted in this StackOverflow thread.

Thanks Ivan Brusic for publishing this guide