Elasticsearch does not have any default security mechanisms. Anyone can destroy your entire data collection with just a single command. However, with the increasing demand of securing Elasticsearch clusters, the Elastic team has launched a new product called shield that provides you with a complete security solution including authentication, encryption, role-based access control, IP filtering, field- and document-level security, and audit logging. However, if you cannot afford shield, there are other ways to protect Elasticsearch. One way can be to not expose Elasticsearch publicly and put a firewall in front of it to allow access to only a limited number of IPs. The other way is to wrap Elasticsearch in a reverse proxy to enable access control and SSL encryption. In this chapter, we will see how you can secure your Elasticsearch cluster using a basic HTTP authentication behind a reverse proxy.
In the remaining sections, we will go on to learn how to use Nginx to secure...