ElasticSearch should use node-to-node encryption

Severity	Exploitability	Providers	Categories
HIGH	LOW	AWS	DATA, NETWORK, PERMISSION

Description

Amazon Elasticsearch is a fully open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and clickstream analysis.

Node-to-node encryption provides an additional layer of security on top of the default features of Amazon Elasticsearch Service. It helps ensure that data remains encrypted as Elasticsearch distributes (and redistributes) it throughout the cluster.

Impact

Potential data exposure	Visible in logs	User interaction required	Privileges required
True	False	False	True

If an attacker gets access to the VPC containing the Elasticsearch cluster, they could read the transiting data.

Remediation guidelines

Enable node-to-node encryption for Elasticsearch. Enabling node-to-node encryption in place for an existing, unencrypted domain requires Elasticsearch version 6.7 or higher. For lower versions, the domain will be recreated, potentially leading to data loss. Enabling node-to-node encryption on new domains requires Elasticsearch version 6.0 or higher.