Do we need X-Pack to enable security in Elasticsearch and kibana?

Question

I made a cluster with 3 master and 5 data nodes.
The cluster even have 25 working indices and 10 Dashboards.
Now I am trying to enable authentication to this cluster.
I have seen some articles saying elastic search have security services free from 7.0 version 
[link](https://www.elastic.co/blog/security-for-elasticsearch-is-now-free).

But when i am going through tutorial its mentioned we need to enable xpack. xpack.security.enable: true.
so is it like we need to have x-pack to fulfill this usecase ?

Answer 1

X-Pack is the name of the module that contains the security code.

For Elasticsearch versions prior to 6.3, X-Pack had to be installed separately as a plugin. Some X-Pack features were free to use (Basic license), some required a commercial license (e.g. Security). Starting with 6.3 the default download contains that X-Pack module already. X-Pack as a product and plugin do no longer exist.

Starting with Elasticsearch version 6.8/7.1 Elastic moved some basic security features from the commercial license into the free Basic tier, only requiring you to configure it.

The parameters for doing so are still prefixed with "xpack", as it is still a setting of an spect from within this module.