Restricting connections with IP filteringedit
You can apply IP filtering to application clients, node clients, or transport clients, remote cluster clients, in addition to other nodes that are attempting to join the cluster.
If a node’s IP address is on the denylist, the Elasticsearch security features allow the connection to Elasticsearch but it is be dropped immediately and no requests are processed.
Elasticsearch installations are not designed to be publicly accessible over the Internet. IP Filtering and the other capabilities of the Elasticsearch security features do not change this condition.
Enabling IP filteringedit
The Elasticsearch security features contain an access control feature that allows or rejects hosts, domains, or subnets. If the operator privileges feature is enabled, only operator users can update these settings.
You configure IP filtering by specifying the xpack.security.transport.filter.allow and
xpack.security.transport.filter.deny settings in elasticsearch.yml. Allow rules
take precedence over the deny rules.
Unless explicitly specified, xpack.security.http.filter.* and
xpack.security.remote_cluster.filter.* settings default to
the corresponding xpack.security.transport.filter.* setting’s value.
xpack.security.transport.filter.allow: "192.168.0.1" xpack.security.transport.filter.deny: "192.168.0.0/24"
The _all keyword can be used to deny all connections that are not explicitly
allowed.
xpack.security.transport.filter.allow: [ "192.168.0.1", "192.168.0.2", "192.168.0.3", "192.168.0.4" ] xpack.security.transport.filter.deny: _all
IP filtering configuration also support IPv6 addresses.
xpack.security.transport.filter.allow: "2001:0db8:1234::/48" xpack.security.transport.filter.deny: "1234:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334"
You can also filter by hostnames when DNS lookups are available.
xpack.security.transport.filter.allow: localhost xpack.security.transport.filter.deny: '*.google.com'
Disabling IP Filteringedit
Disabling IP filtering can slightly improve performance under some conditions.
To disable IP filtering entirely, set the value of the xpack.security.transport.filter.enabled
setting in the elasticsearch.yml configuration file to false.
xpack.security.transport.filter.enabled: false
You can also disable IP filtering for the transport protocol but enable it for HTTP only.
xpack.security.transport.filter.enabled: false xpack.security.http.filter.enabled: true
Specifying TCP transport profilesedit
TCP transport profiles enable Elasticsearch to bind on multiple hosts. The Elasticsearch security features enable you to apply different IP filtering on different profiles.
xpack.security.transport.filter.allow: 172.16.0.0/24 xpack.security.transport.filter.deny: _all transport.profiles.client.xpack.security.filter.allow: 192.168.0.0/24 transport.profiles.client.xpack.security.filter.deny: _all
When you do not specify a profile, default is used automatically.
HTTP filteringedit
You may want to have different IP filtering for the transport and HTTP protocols.
xpack.security.transport.filter.allow: localhost xpack.security.transport.filter.deny: '*.google.com' xpack.security.http.filter.allow: 172.16.0.0/16 xpack.security.http.filter.deny: _all
Remote cluster (API key based model) filteringedit
This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.
If other clusters connect using API key authentication for cross-cluster search or cross-cluster replication, you may want to have different IP filtering for the remote cluster server interface.
xpack.security.remote_cluster.filter.allow: 192.168.1.0/8 xpack.security.remote_cluster.filter.deny: 192.168.0.0/16 xpack.security.transport.filter.allow: localhost xpack.security.transport.filter.deny: '*.google.com' xpack.security.http.filter.allow: 172.16.0.0/16 xpack.security.http.filter.deny: _all
Whether IP filtering for remote cluster is enabled is controlled by
xpack.security.transport.filter.enabled as well. This means filtering for
the remote cluster and transport interfaces must be enabled or disabled together.
But the exact allow and deny lists can be different between them.
Dynamically updating IP filter settingsedit
In case of running in an environment with highly dynamic IP addresses like cloud based hosting, it is very hard to know the IP addresses upfront when provisioning a machine. Instead of changing the configuration file and restarting the node, you can use the Cluster Update Settings API. For example:
PUT /_cluster/settings
{
"persistent" : {
"xpack.security.transport.filter.allow" : "172.16.0.0/24"
}
}
You can also dynamically disable filtering completely:
PUT /_cluster/settings
{
"persistent" : {
"xpack.security.transport.filter.enabled" : false
}
}
In order to avoid locking yourself out of the cluster, the default bound transport address will never be denied. This means you can always SSH into a system and use curl to apply changes.