Authentication realms

ECE ECK Elastic Cloud Hosted Self Managed

Elastic authenticates users by using realms and one or more token-based authentication services.

A realm is used to resolve and authenticate users based on authentication tokens. There are two types of realms:

Internal: Realms that are internal to Elasticsearch and don’t require any communication with external parties. They are fully managed by Elasticsearch. There can only be a maximum of one configured realm per internal realm type. Elasticsearch provides two internal realm types: native and file.
External: Realms that require interaction with parties and components external to Elasticsearch, typically with enterprise grade identity management systems. Unlike internal realms, you can have as many external realms as you would like, each with its own unique name and configuration. View external realm types.

Configuring realms

To learn how to configure and use a specific realm, follow the documentation for the realm that you want to use. You can also configure a custom realm by building a custom realm plugin.

You can also perform the following tasks to further configure your realms:

Prioritize your realms using realm chains.
Allow a single user to authenticate using multiple realms by grouping them together in a security domain.

Internal realms

Elasticsearch provides the following built-in internal realms:

native: Users are stored in a dedicated Elasticsearch index. This realm supports an authentication token in the form of username and password, and is available by default when no realms are explicitly configured. Users are managed through Kibana, or using user management APIs. See Native user authentication.
file: Users are defined in files stored on each node in the Elasticsearch cluster. This realm supports an authentication token in the form of username and password and is always available. See File-based user authentication. Available for Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes and self-managed deployments only.

External realms

Elasticsearch provides the following built-in external realms:

ldap: Uses an external LDAP server to authenticate the users. This realm supports an authentication token in the form of username and password, and requires explicit configuration in order to be used. See LDAP user authentication.
active_directory: Uses an external Active Directory Server to authenticate the users. With this realm, users are authenticated by usernames and passwords. See Active Directory user authentication.
pki: Authenticates users using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). This realm works in conjunction with SSL/TLS and identifies the users through the Distinguished Name (DN) of the client’s X.509 certificates. See PKI user authentication.
saml: Facilitates authentication using the SAML 2.0 Web SSO protocol. This realm is designed to support authentication through Kibana and is not intended for use in the REST API. See SAML authentication.
kerberos: Authenticates a user using Kerberos authentication. Users are authenticated on the basis of Kerberos tickets. See Kerberos authentication.
oidc: Facilitates authentication using OpenID Connect. It enables Elasticsearch to serve as an OpenID Connect Relying Party (RP) and provide single sign-on (SSO) support in Kibana. See Configuring single sign-on to the Elastic Stack using OpenID Connect.
jwt: Facilitates using JWT identity tokens as authentication bearer tokens. Compatible tokens are OpenID Connect ID Tokens, or custom JWTs containing the same claims. See JWT authentication.

Custom realms

If you need to integrate with another authentication system, you can build a custom realm plugin. For more information, see Integrating with other authentication systems.