CSS limits access to security-mode clusters to authorized users only. When creating a security-mode cluster, an administrator account must be created. This administrator account can use OpenSearch Dashboards to add new users for the cluster and grant them the required permissions.
CSS uses the opendistro_security plug-in to provide security cluster capabilities. The opendistro_security plug-in is built based on the RBAC model. RBAC involves three core concepts: user, action, and role. RBAC simplifies the relationship between users and actions, simplifies permission management, and facilitates permission expansion and maintenance. The following figure shows the relationship between the three.
Figure 1 User, action, and role

Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
Permission | A single permission, for example, creating an index (for example, indices:admin/create). |
Action group | An action group is a group of permissions. For example, the predefined SEARCH action group grants roles permissions to use _search and _msearch APIs. |
Role | A role is a combination of permissions or action groups, including operation permissions on clusters, indexes, documents, or fields. |
User | A user can send operation requests to an OpenSearch cluster. The user has credentials such as username and password, and zero or multiple backend roles and custom attributes. |
Role mapping | A user will be assigned a role after successful authentication. Role mapping means to map a role to a user (or a backend role). For example, the mapping from Dashboards_user (role) to Bob (user) means that Bob obtains all permissions of Dashboards_user after authentication. Similarly, the mapping from all_access (role) to admin (backend role) means that any user with the backend role admin (from the LDAP/Active Directory server) has all the permissions of role all_access after being authenticated. You can map each role to multiple users or backend roles. |
On OpenSearch Dashboards, you can configure user permissions on the OpenSearch cluster under Security to implement fine-grained access control at four levels: cluster, index, document, and field.
Users can be added or deleted for a cluster, and mapped to roles. This way, you assign roles to users.
With role mapping, you can configure the members of each role and assign roles to users based on usernames, backend roles, and host names. For each role, you can configure cluster, index, and document access permissions, as well as the permission to use OpenSearch Dashboards.
For more about security configuration for a security-mode cluster and the detailed guide, see the official OpenSearch document About Security in OpenSearch.
You can customize the username, role name, and tenant name in the OpenSearch Dashboards.
Figure 2 Going to the Security page

Figure 3 Creating a user

Figure 4 Entering the username and password

Figure 5 User information

Figure 6 Setting a role name

Figure 7 Assigning cluster-level permissions

Figure 8 Setting index permissions

Figure 9 Role permissions

After the setting is complete, you can view the created role on the Roles page.

