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X-Pack for the Elastic Stack [5.1] » Securing Elasticsearch and Kibana » Tribe, Clients and Integrations » Tribe Nodes and Security
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Tribe Nodes and Security

Tribe nodes act as a federated client across multiple clusters. When using tribe nodes with secured clusters, all clusters must have X-Pack security enabled and share the same security configuration (users, roles, user-role mappings, SSL/TLS CA). The tribe node itself also must be configured to grant access to actions and indices on all of the connected clusters, as security checks on incoming requests are primarily done on the tribe node itself.

Important

Kibana 5.0 does not support tribe nodes. We are working on a solution that addresses this limitation.

To use a tribe node with secured clusters:

  1. Install X-Pack on the tribe node and every node in each connected cluster.

  2. Enable message authentication globally. Generate a system key on one node and copy it to the tribe node and every other node in each of the connected clusters.

    Important

    For message authentication to work properly across multiple clusters, the tribe node and all of the connected clusters must share the same system key. X-Pack security reads the system key from CONFIG_DIR/x-pack/system_key.

  3. Enable encryption globally. To encrypt communications, you must enable enable SSL/TLS on every node.

    Tip

    To simplify SSL/TLS configuration, use the same certificate authority to generate certificates for all connected clusters.

  4. Configure the tribe in the tribe node’s elasticsearch.yml file. You must specify each cluster that is a part of the tribe and configure discovery and encryption settings per cluster. For example, the following configuration adds two clusters to the tribe: 

    tribe:
  on_conflict: prefer_cluster1 
  c1: 
    cluster.name: cluster1
    discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: [ "cluster1-node1:9300", "cluster1-node2:9300"]
    xpack.ssl.key: /home/es/config/x-pack/es-tribe-01.key
    xpack.ssl.certificate: /home/es/config/x-pack/es-tribe-01.crt
    xpack.ssl.certificate_authorities: [ "/home/es/config/x-pack/ca.crt" ]
    xpack.security.transport.ssl.enabled: true
    xpack.security.http.ssl.enabled: true
  c2:
    cluster.name: cluster2
    discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: [ "cluster2-node1:9300", "cluster2-node2:9300"]
    xpack.ssl.key: /home/es/config/x-pack/es-tribe-01.key
    xpack.ssl.certificate: /home/es/config/x-pack/es-tribe-01.crt
    xpack.ssl.certificate_authorities: [ "/home/es/config/x-pack/ca.crt" ]
    xpack.security.transport.ssl.enabled: true
    xpack.security.http.ssl.enabled: true

    Results are returned from the preferred cluster if the named index exists in multiple clusters. A preference is required when using X-Pack security on a tribe node.

    An arbitrary name that represents the connection to the cluster.

  5. Configure the same index privileges for your users on all nodes, including the tribe node. The nodes in each cluster must grant access to indices in other connected clusters as well as their own.

    For example, let’s assume cluster1 and cluster2 each have a indices index1 and index2. To enable a user to submit a request through the tribe node to search both clusters:

    1. On the tribe node and both clusters, define a tribe_user role that has read access to index1 and index2: 

      tribe_user:
  indices:
    'index*': search

    2. Assign the tribe_user role to a user on the tribe node and both clusters. For example, run the following command on each node to create my_tribe_user and assign the tribe_user role: 

      ./bin/shield/users useradd my_tribe_user -p password -r tribe_user
      Note

      Each cluster needs to have its own users with admin privileges. You cannot perform administration tasks such as create index through the tribe node, you must send the request directly to the appropriate cluster.

  6. To enable selected users to retrieve merged cluster state information for the tribe from the tribe node, grant them the cluster monitor privilege on the tribe node. For example, you could create a tribe_monitor role that assigns the monitor privilege: 

    tribe_monitor:
  cluster: monitor
  7. Start the tribe node. If you’ve made configuration changes to the nodes in the connected clusters, they also need to be restarted.
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