Elasticsearch authentication provides improved security for the back-end Workbench storage, essentially requiring a username and password to access the Elasticsearch data.
Elasticsearch authentication is not enabled by default and can be enabled through the Workbench UI post installation.
Elasticsearch handles authentication/authorization by using File-based user authentication. All the data about the users for the file realm is stored in two files on each node in the cluster: users and users_roles. Both files are located in Elasticsearch config directory and are read on startup.
The users and users_roles files are managed locally by the node and are not managed globally by the cluster. This means that with a typical multi-node cluster, the exact same changes need to be applied on each and every node in the Workbench cluster, as such, any change from the Workbench UI will be reflected automatically in all other nodes in the cluster.
