You can configure Elastic Stack security features to use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificates to authenticate users in Elasticsearch. This requires clients to present X.509 certificates.

You cannot use PKI certificates to authenticate users in Kibana.

To use PKI in Elasticsearch, you configure a PKI realm, enable client authentication on the desired network layers (transport or http), and map the Distinguished Names (DNs) from the user certificates to roles in the role mapping file.

See Configuring a PKI realm.