Authentication did not contain metadata – How to solve this Elasticsearch exception

Opster Team

August-23, Version: 7.2-8.9

Briefly, this error occurs when Elasticsearch receives a request that lacks the necessary authentication metadata. This could be due to incorrect configuration of security settings or missing credentials in the request. To resolve this issue, you can check and correct your security settings, ensuring that they are properly configured. Also, verify that your requests include the necessary authentication credentials. If you’re using an API, ensure that it’s correctly passing the authentication information.

This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” Authentication did not contain metadata ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: plugin, metadata.

 
 

plugins

 
 

metadata

Overview

Metadata in Elasticsearch refers to additional information stored for each document. This is achieved using the specific metadata fields available in Elasticsearch. The default behavior of some of these metadata fields can be customized during mapping creation.

Examples

Using _meta meta-field for storing application-specific information with the mapping:

PUT /my_index?pretty
{
  "mappings": {
    "_meta": { 
      "domain": "security",
      "release_information": {
        "date": "18-01-2020",
        "version": "7.5"
      }
    }
  }
}

Notes

  • In version 2.x, Elasticsearch had a total 13 meta fields available, which are: _index, _uid, _type, _id, _source, _size, _all, _field_names, _timestamp, _ttl, _parent, _routing, _meta
  • In version 5.x, _timestamp and _ttl meta fields were removed.
  • In version 6.x, the _parent meta field was removed.
  • In version 7.x, _uid and _all meta fields were removed.
 
 

Log Context

Log “Authentication did not contain metadata” class name is TransportOpenIdConnectLogoutAction.java. We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :

 return ((OpenIdConnectRealm) realm).buildLogoutResponse(idToken);
 }  private void validateAuthenticationAndMetadata(Authentication authentication; Map tokenMetadata) {
 if (tokenMetadata == null) {
 throw new ElasticsearchSecurityException("Authentication did not contain metadata");
 }
 if (authentication == null) {
 throw new ElasticsearchSecurityException("No active authentication");
 }
 final User user = authentication.getEffectiveSubject().getUser();

 

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