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Setting Up User Authentication

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Setting Up User Authentication

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Authentication identifies an individual. To gain access to restricted resources, a user must prove their identity, via passwords, credentials, or some other means (typically referred to as authentication tokens).

You can use the native support for managing and authenticating users, or integrate with external user management systems such as LDAP and Active Directory. For information about managing native users, see Managing Native Users.

Built-in Users

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X-Pack security provides built-in user credentials to help you get up and running. These users have a fixed set of privileges and the default password changeme.

Table 3. X-Pack security Built-in Users

Name	Description
`elastic`	A built-in superuser.
`kibana`	The user Kibana uses to connect and communicate with Elasticsearch.
`logstash_system`	The user Logstash uses when storing monitoring information in Elasticsearch.

You must reset the default passwords for all built-in users. You can update passwords from the Management > Users UI in Kibana or with the Reset Password API:

PUT _xpack/security/user/elastic/_password
{
  "password": "elasticpassword"
}

PUT _xpack/security/user/kibana/_password
{
  "password": "kibanapassword"
}

PUT _xpack/security/user/logstash_system/_password
{
  "password": "logstashpassword"
}

Once the kibana user password is reset, you need to update the Kibana server with the new password by setting elasticsearch.password in the kibana.yml configuration file:

elasticsearch.password: kibanapassword

The logstash_system user is used internally within Logstash when monitoring is enabled for logstash

If you wish to enable this feature in Logstash, then you need to update the Logstash configuration with the new password by setting xpack.monitoring.elasticsearch.password in the logstash.yml configuration file:

xpack.monitoring.elasticsearch.password: logstashpassword

If you have upgraded from an older version of elasticsearch/x-pack, the logstash_system user may have defaulted to disabled for security reasons. Once the password has been changed, you can enable the user via the following API call:

PUT _xpack/security/user/logstash_system/_enable

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