Certificates deployment

In the installation guide, the Search Guard's offline TLS tool has been used to create certificates, but any other certificates creation method, for example using OpenSSL, can be used.

Open Distro for Elasticsearch uses four kinds of certificates:

  • root-ca: This certificate is the one in charge of signing the rest of the certificates.

  • node: The node certificates are the ones needed for every Elasticsearch node. They must include the node IP.

  • client: Those certificates are the ones in charge of the communication between the different parts of the installation e.g. Filebeat and Kibana.

  • admin: The admin certificate is a client certificate with special privileges needed for management and security related tasks.

To create the certificates, the template located in the ~/searchguard/search-guard.yml file was used. This template is preconfigured with the default values, which are recommended to change for security reasons. Those values are:

  • CN: Stands for Common Name. This is an arbirtary name which represents the server name protected by the SSL certificate. The certificate is only valid if the request hostname matches the certificate common name.

  • OU: Organizational Unit name.

  • O: Organization name.

  • L: Locality name.

  • C: Country name. This value should be introduced using the two letter code, e.g.: US.

These are the default values that are preconfigured in the template downloaded, nevertheless, there are some other values that can be added to the certificates:

  • S: State or province. It should be spelled out in full, not using abbreviations.

  • E: Email adress.

There can be added even more security improvements, such as the use of a password for the private keys or the creation of intermediate CA certificates. To learn more about this, visit the Search Guard's offline TLS tool documentation.

The node certificates need the server's IP to be specified, and there can be added as many IPs as necessary. To create a node certificate, the following lines should be added to the ~/searchguard/search-guard.yml file in the nodes: section modifying the required fields on the Elasticsearch's master node:

- name: <certificate_name>
    dn: CN=<common-name>,OU=<operational-unit>,O=<organization>,L=<locality>,C=<country-code>
    ip:
        - <node_IP_1>
        - <node_IP_2>
        - <node_IP_3>

As mentioned before, client and admin certificates are very similar, although the admin ones have more privileges. An admin certificate must be in at least one of the Elasticsearch nodes, which will be able to perform administration and security tasks. To create an admin certificate, the following lines should be added to the ~/searchguard/search-guard.yml file in the clients: section modifying the required fields on the Elasticsearch's master node:

- name: <certificate_name>
dn: CN=<common-name>,OU=<operational-unit>,O=<organization>,L=<locality>,C=<country-code>
admin: true

What differs a client certificate from an admin certificate is the admin tag. If it is set to true this certificate will be granted with extra permissions. Here is an example for creating a client certificate:

- name: <certificate_name>
dn: CN=<common-name>,OU=<operational-unit>,O=<organization>,L=<locality>,C=<country-code>

Generate new certificates

Once the file ~/searchguard/search-guard.yml has been modified, the certificates can be created using the following command:

# ./searchguard/tools/sgtlstool.sh -c ./searchguard/search-guard.yml -ca -crt

This command will generate both, the root.ca certificate and all the nodes and clients certificates. In case the root-ca certificate was previously created, the -ca tag can be omitted. By default, when the script is re-executed, the already present certificates will not be overwritten. Additionally, the tag -t can be added to specify the output destination. If not modified, the generated certificates will be placed at ./out. These and other configuration options can be found in the Search Guard's offline TLS tool documentation.

When new node certificates are created, they must be added in the Elasticsearch's configuration file placed at /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml under the opendistro_security.nodes_dn section:

opendistro_security.nodes_dn:
    - CN=node-1,OU=Docu,O=Wazuh,L=California,C=US
    - CN=<common_name>,OU=<operational_unit>,O=<organization_name>,L=<locality>,C=<country_code>