Splunk® Enterprise

Securing Splunk Enterprise

Splunk Enterprise versions higher than version 9.4.2 are documented on our new documentation portal only. To get started, see the Splunk Enterprise page on help.splunk.com and the Splunk Enterprise 9.4.3 release notes. For information about how version selection works in the new portal, see Version selection on the About This Site page.

Securing distributed search heads and peers

Distributed search configurations share search information, knowledge objects and app and configuration information over the management port.

Communication between search heads and peers relies on public-key encryption. Upon startup, Splunk software generates a private key and public key on your Splunk installation. When you configure distributed search on the search head, the public keys are distributed by search heads to peers and those keys are used to secure communication. This default configuration provides built-in encryption as well as data compression that improves performance.

It is possible to swap these generated keys out with your own keys, though the existing keys are generally considered adequate for most configurations.

To configure public-key encryption for distributed search setups, you create your keys and distribute them to your search heads and peers. To learn more about distributing key files to distributed search peers, look in the section on configuring distributed search in the Distributed Search manual: "Distribute the key files".

Last modified on 20 January, 2017
Configure secure communications between Splunk instances with updated cipher suite and message authentication code   Secure deployment servers and clients using certificate authentication

This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Enterprise: 7.0.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, 7.0.3, 7.0.4, 7.0.5, 7.0.6, 7.0.7, 7.0.8, 7.0.9, 7.0.10, 7.0.11, 7.0.13, 7.1.0, 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 7.1.3, 7.1.4, 7.1.5, 7.1.6, 7.1.7, 7.1.8, 7.1.9, 7.1.10, 7.2.0, 7.2.1, 7.2.2, 7.2.3, 7.2.4, 7.2.5, 7.2.6, 7.2.7, 7.2.8, 7.2.9, 7.2.10, 7.3.0, 7.3.1, 7.3.2, 7.3.3, 7.3.4, 7.3.5, 7.3.6, 7.3.7, 7.3.8, 7.3.9, 8.0.0, 8.0.1, 8.0.2, 8.0.3, 8.0.4, 8.0.5, 8.0.6, 8.0.7, 8.0.8, 8.0.9, 8.0.10, 8.1.0, 8.1.1, 8.1.2, 8.1.3, 8.1.4, 8.1.5, 8.1.6, 8.1.7, 8.1.8, 8.1.9, 8.1.10, 8.1.11, 8.1.12, 8.1.13, 8.1.14, 8.2.0, 8.2.1, 8.2.2, 8.2.3, 8.2.4, 8.2.5, 8.2.6, 8.2.7, 8.2.8, 8.2.9, 8.2.10, 8.2.11, 8.2.12, 9.0.0, 9.0.1, 9.0.2, 9.0.3, 9.0.4, 9.0.5, 9.0.6, 9.0.7, 9.0.8, 9.0.9, 9.0.10, 9.1.0, 9.1.1, 9.1.2, 9.1.3, 9.1.4, 9.1.5, 9.1.6, 9.1.7, 9.1.8, 9.1.9, 9.2.0, 9.2.1, 9.2.2, 9.2.3, 9.2.4, 9.2.5, 9.2.6, 9.3.0, 9.3.1, 9.3.2, 9.3.3, 9.3.4, 9.4.0, 9.4.1, 9.4.2

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