Token-based authentication systems are popular in the world of web services. They provide many benefits, including (but not limited to) security, scalability, statelessness, and extensibility. With Amazon’s Open Distro for Elasticsearch, users now have an opportunity to take advantage of the numerous security features included in the Security plugin. One such feature is the ability to authenticate users with JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for a single sign-on experience. In this post, I walk through how to generate valid JWTs, configure the Security plugin to support JWTs, and finally authenticate requests to both Elasticsearch and Kibana using claims presented in the tokens.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/blog/open%20distro%20for%20elasticsearch%20updates/2019/05/Use-JSON-Web-Tokens-JWTs-to-Authenticate-in-Open-Distro-for-Elasticsearch-and-Kibana/