Setting Up Field and Document Level Securityedit

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.

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.

A role can define both field and document level permissions on a per-index basis. A role that doesn’t specify field level permissions grants access to ALL fields. Similarly, a role that doesn’t specify document level permissions grants access to ALL documents in the index.

When assigning users multiple roles, be careful that you don’t inadvertently grant wider access than intended. Each user has a single set of field level and document level permissions per index. When you assign a user multiple roles, the permissions are ORed together. This means if you assign one role that restricts access to particular fields in an index, and another that doesn’t specify any field level access restrictions for that index, the user will have access to all fields. The same is true for document level permissions.

For example, let’s say role_a only grants access to the address field of the documents in index1, but doesn’t specify any document restrictions. Conversely, role_b limits access to a subset of the documents in index1, but doesn’t specify any field restrictions. If you assign a user both roles, role_a gives the user access to all documents and role_b gives the user access to all fields.

If you need to restrict access to both documents and fields, consider splitting documents by index instead.

Field Level Securityedit

To enable field level security, you specify the fields that each role can access as part of the indices permissions in a role definition. This binds field level security to a well defined set of indices (and potentially a set of documents).

The following role definition grants read access only to the category, @timestamp, and message fields in all the events-* indices.

{
  "indices": [
    {
      "names": [ "events-*" ],
      "privileges": [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant" : [ "category", "@timestamp", "message" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

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.

You can also specify field expressions. For example, the following example grants read access to all fields starting with event_ prefix:

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant" : [ "event_*" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Use the dot notations to refer to nested fields in more complex documents. For example, assuming the following document:

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

The following role definition only allows access to the customer handle field:

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant" : [ "customer.handle" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

This is where wildcard support shines. For example, use customer.* to only enable read access to the customer data:

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant" : [ "customer.*" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Similar to granting field permissions the permission to access fields can be denied with the following syntax:

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant" : [ "*"],
        "except": [ "customer.handle" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

The following rules apply:

Absence of "field_security" in a role is equivalent to * access. Denied fields may only be provided if permission has been granted explicitly to other fields. The exceptions given must be a subset of the fields that permissions have been granted to. Denied and granted fields defined implies access to all granted fields except those which match the pattern in denied fields. Example:

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "except": [ "customer.handle" ],
        "grant" : [ "customer.*" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

In the above example all fields with the prefix "customer." are allowed except for "customer.handle".

An empty array for grant (eg. "grant" : []) means that no fields are granted access to.

Field Level Security and Rolesedit

When a user has several roles that specify field level permissions then the resulting field level permissions per index are the union of the individual role permissions. For example if these two roles are merged:

{
  // role 1
  ...
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant": [ "a.*" ],
        "except" : [ "a.b*" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

{
  // role 2
  ...
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant": [ "a.b*" ],
        "except" : [ "a.b.c*" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Then the resulting permission would be equal to:

{
  // role 1 + role 2
  ...
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "field_security" : {
        "grant": [ "a.*" ],
        "except" : [ "a.b.c*" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Document Level Securityedit

Document level security restricts the documents that users have read access to. To enable document level security, you specify a query that matches all the accessible documents as part of the indices permissions within a role definition. This binds document level security to a well defined set of indices.

Enabling document level security restricts which documents can be accessed from any document based read 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.

The following role definition grants read access only to documents that belong to the click category within all the events-* indices.

{
  "indices": [
    {
      "names": [ "events-*" ],
      "privileges": [ "read" ],
      "query": "{\"match\": {\"category\": \"click\"}}"
    }
  ]
}

Omitting the query entry entirely disables document level security for the respective indices permission entry.

The specified query expects the same format as if it was defined in the search request and supports ELasticsearch’s full Query DSL.

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

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "*" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "query" : {
        "term" : { "department_id" : 12 }
      }
    }
  ]
}

query also accepts queries written as string values

Templating a Role Queryedit

You can use Mustache templates in a role query to insert the username of the current authenticated user into the role. Like other places in Elasticsearch that support templating or scripting, you can specify inline, stored, or file based templates and define custom parameters. You access the current authenticated user’s details through the _user parameter.

For example, the following role query uses a template to insert the username of the current authenticated user:

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "my_index" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "query" : {
        "template" : {
          "inline" : {
            "term" : { "acl.username" : "{{_user.username}}" }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

You can access the following information through the _user variable:

Property Description

_user.username

The username of the current authenticated user.

_user.full_name

If specified, the full name of the current authenticated user.

_user.email

If specified, the email of the current authenticated user.

_user.roles

If associated, a list of the role names of the current authenticated user.

_user.metadata

If specified, a hash holding custom metadata of the current authenticated user.

You can also access custom user metadata. For example, if you maintain a group_id in your user metadata, you can apply document level security based on the group.id field in your documents:

{
  "indices" : [
    {
      "names" : [ "my_index" ],
      "privileges" : [ "read" ],
      "query" : {
        "template" : {
          "inline" : {
            "term" : { "group.id" : "{{_user.metadata.group_id}}" }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Set Security User Ingest Processoredit

If an index is being shared by many small users it makes sense put all these users into the same index as having a dedicated index or shard per user is too wasteful. In order to guarantee that a user only read its own documents it makes sense to set up document level security. In order to use document level security for this each document must have the username or role name associated with it, so that it can be queried by the document level security’s role query. This is where the set_security_user ingest processor can help.

You need to make sure to use unique ids for each user that uses the same index, because document level security doesn’t apply on write APIs and you can overwrite other users' documents. This ingest processor just adds properties of the current authenticated user to the documents being indexed.

The set_security_user processor attaches user related details (username, roles, email, full_name and metadata ) from the current authenticated user to the current document by pre-processed by ingest.

So when indexing data with an ingest pipeline then user details get automatically attached with the document:

PUT shared-logs/log/1?pipeline=my_pipeline_id
{
  ...
}

Read the ingest docs for more information about setting up a pipeline and other processors.

Table 11. Set Security User Options

Name Required Default Description

field

yes

-

The field to store the user information into.

properties

no

[username, roles, email, full_name, metadata]

Controls what user related properties are added to the field.

Example config that adds all user details of the current authenticated user to the user field to all documents being processed by this pipeline:

{
  "processors" : [
    {
      "set_security_user": {
        "field": "user"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Multiple Roles with Document and Field Level Securityedit

A user can have many roles and each role can define different permissions on the same index. It is important to understand the behavior of Document and Field Level security in this scenario.

Document level security will take into account each role held by the user, and combine each document level security query for a given index with an "OR". This means that only one of the role queries must match for a document to be returned. For example, if a role grants access to an index without document level security and another grants access with document level security, document level security will not be applied; the user with both roles will have access to all of the documents in the index.

Field level security will take into account each role the user has and combine all of the fields listed into a single set for each index. For example, if a role grants access to an index without field level security and another grants access with field level security, field level security will not be applied for that index; the user with both roles will have access to all of the fields in in the index.