SSL certificate API

The certificates API enables you to retrieve information about the X.509 certificates that are used to encrypt communications in your Elasticsearch cluster.

Request

GET /_ssl/certificates

Prerequisites

  • If the security features are enabled, you must have monitor cluster privileges to use this API. For more information, see Security privileges.

Description

For more information about how certificates are configured in conjunction with Transport Layer Security (TLS), see Setting up TLS on a cluster.

The API returns a list that includes certificates from all TLS contexts including:

  • Settings for transport and HTTP interfaces
  • TLS settings that are used within authentication realms
  • TLS settings for remote monitoring exporters

The list includes certificates that are used for configuring trust, such as those configured in the xpack.security.transport.ssl.truststore and xpack.security.transport.ssl.certificate_authorities settings. It also includes certificates that are used for configuring server identity, such as xpack.security.http.ssl.keystore and xpack.security.http.ssl.certificate settings.

The list does not include certificates that are sourced from the default SSL context of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), even if those certificates are in use within Elasticsearch.

When a PKCS#11 token is configured as the truststore of the JRE, the API will return all the certificates that are included in the PKCS#11 token irrespectively to whether these are used in the Elasticsearch TLS configuration or not.

If Elasticsearch is configured to use a keystore or truststore, the API output includes all certificates in that store, even though some of the certificates might not be in active use within the cluster.

Response body

The response is an array of objects, with each object representing a single certificate. The fields in each object are:

path

(string) The path to the certificate, as configured in the elasticsearch.yml file.

format

(string) The format of the file. One of: jks, PKCS12, PEM.

alias

(string) If the path refers to a container file (a jks keystore, or a PKCS#12 file), the alias of the certificate. Otherwise, null.

subject_dn

(string) The Distinguished Name of the certificate’s subject.

serial_number

(string) The hexadecimal representation of the certificate’s serial number.

has_private_key

(boolean) If Elasticsearch has access to the private key for this certificate, this field has a value of true.

expiry

(string) The ISO formatted date of the certificate’s expiry (not-after) date.

Examples

The following example provides information about the certificates on a single node of Elasticsearch:

  1. GET /_ssl/certificates

The API returns the following results:

  1. [
  2.   {
  3.     "path": "certs/elastic-certificates.p12",
  4.     "format": "PKCS12",
  5.     "alias": "instance",
  6.     "subject_dn": "CN=Elastic Certificate Tool Autogenerated CA",
  7.     "serial_number": "a20f0ee901e8f69dc633ff633e5cd5437cdb4137",
  8.     "has_private_key": false,
  9.     "expiry": "2021-01-15T20:42:49.000Z"
  10.   },
  11.   {
  12.     "path": "certs/elastic-certificates.p12",
  13.     "format": "PKCS12",
  14.     "alias": "ca",
  15.     "subject_dn": "CN=Elastic Certificate Tool Autogenerated CA",
  16.     "serial_number": "a20f0ee901e8f69dc633ff633e5cd5437cdb4137",
  17.     "has_private_key": false,
  18.     "expiry": "2021-01-15T20:42:49.000Z"
  19.   },
  20.   {
  21.     "path": "certs/elastic-certificates.p12",
  22.     "format": "PKCS12",
  23.     "alias": "instance",
  24.     "subject_dn": "CN=instance",
  25.     "serial_number": "fc1905e1494dc5230218d079c47a617088f84ce0",
  26.     "has_private_key": true,
  27.     "expiry": "2021-01-15T20:44:32.000Z"
  28.   }
  29. ]