Submitting Requests on Behalf of Other Users

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X-Pack security supports a permission that enables an authenticated user to submit requests on behalf of other users. If your application already authenticates users, you can use the run as mechanism to restrict data access according to X-Pack security permissions without having to re-authenticate each user through.

To "run as" (impersonate) another user, you must be able to retrieve the user from the realm you use to authenticate. Both the internal native and file realms support this out of the box. The LDAP realm however must be configured to enable user search. For more information, see Configuring an LDAP Realm with User Search.

To submit requests on behalf of other users, you need to have the run_as permission. For example, the following role grants permission to submit request on behalf of jacknich or redeniro:

{
  "run_as" : [ "jacknich", "rdeniro" ]
}

To submit a request as another user, you specify the user in the es-security-runas-user request header. For example:

curl -H "es-security-runas-user: jacknich"  -u es_admin -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/'