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. See Multiple Roles with Document and Field Level Security.

Field Level Securityedit

To enable field level security, specify the fields that each role can access as part of the indices permissions in a role definition. Field level security is thus bound 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 that start with an 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 enables only read 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 enable only read access to the customer data:

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

You can deny permission to access fields with the following syntax:

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

The following rules apply:

  • The absence of field_security in a role is equivalent to * access.
  • If permission has been granted explicitly to some fields, you can specify denied fields. The denied fields must be a subset of the fields to which permissions were granted.
  • Defining denied and granted fields implies access to all granted fields except those which match the pattern in the denied fields.

For example:

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

In the above example, users can read all fields with the prefix "customer." except for "customer.handle".

An empty array for grant (for example, "grant" : []) means that access has not been granted to any fields.

Field Level Security and Rolesedit

When a user has several roles that specify field level permissions, 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*" ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

The resulting permission is 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, specify a query that matches all the accessible documents as part of the indices permissions within a role definition. Document level security is thus bound 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 the full Elasticsearch Query DSL.

For example, the following role grants read access only to the 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 details for the current authenticated user 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" : {
          "source" : {
            "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" : {
          "source" : {
            "term" : { "group.id" : "{{_user.metadata.group_id}}" }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Set Security User Ingest Processoredit

If an index is shared by many small users it makes sense to put all these users into the same index. Having a dedicated index or shard per user is wasteful. To guarantee that a user reads only their own documents, it makes sense to set up document level security. In this scenario, each document must have the username or role name associated with it, so that this information can be used by the role query for document level security. This is a situation where the set_security_user ingest processor can help.

Document level security doesn’t apply to write APIs. You must use unique ids for each user that uses the same index, otherwise they might overwrite other users' documents. The ingest processor just adds properties for the current authenticated user to the documents that are being indexed.

The set_security_user processor attaches user-related details (such as username, roles, email, full_name and metadata ) from the current authenticated user to the current document by pre-processing the ingest. When you index data with an ingest pipeline, user details are automatically attached to the document. For example:

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 7. 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.

The following example adds all user details for the current authenticated user to the user field for all documents that are 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 takes into account each role held by the user and combines 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 is not applied; the user with both roles has access to all of the documents in the index.

Field level security takes into account each role the user has and combines 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 is not be applied for that index; the user with both roles has access to all of the fields in the index.

For example, let’s say role_a grants access to only the address field of the documents in index1; it doesn’t specify any document restrictions. Conversely, role_b limits access to a subset of the documents in index1; it 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.