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+.. _security:
+
+=======================
+Security Considerations
+=======================
+
+A Patroni cluster has two interfaces to be protected from unauthorized access: the distributed configuration storage (DCS) and the Patroni REST API.
+
+Protecting DCS
+==============
+
+Patroni and patronictl both store and retrieve data to/from the DCS. 
+
+Despite DCS doesn't contain any sensitive information, it allows changing some of Patroni/Postgres configuration. Therefore the very first thing that should be protected is DCS itself.
+
+The details of protection depend on the type of DCS used. The authentication and encryption parameters (tokens/basic-auth/client certificates) for the supported types of DCS are covered in :ref:`SETTINGS <bootstrap_settings>` 
+
+The general recommendation is to enable TLS for all DCS communication.
+
+Protecting the REST API
+=======================
+
+Protecting the REST API is a more complicated task.
+
+The Patroni REST API is used by Patroni itself during the leader race, by the ``patronictl`` tool in order to perform failovers/switchovers/reinitialize/restarts/reloads, by HAProxy or any other kind of load balancer to perform HTTP health checks, and of course could also be used for monitoring. 
+
+From the point of view of security, REST API contains safe (``GET`` requests, only retrieve information) and unsafe (``PUT``, ``POST``, ``PATCH`` and ``DELETE`` requests, change the state of nodes) endpoints.
+
+The unsafe endpoints can be protected with HTTP basic-auth by setting the ``restapi.authentication.username`` and ``restapi.authentication.password`` parameters. There is no way to protect the safe endpoints without enabling TLS.
+
+When TLS for the REST API is enabled and a PKI is established, mutual authentication of the API server and API client is possible for all endpoints.
+
+The ``restapi`` section parameters enable TLS client authentication to the server. Depending on the value of the ``verify_client`` parameter, the API server requires a successful client certificate verification for both safe and unsafe API calls (``verify_client: required``), or only for unsafe API calls (``verify_client: optional``), or for no API calls (``verify_client: none``).
+
+The ``ctl`` section parameters enable TLS server authentication to the client (the ``patronictl`` tool which uses the same config as patroni). Set ``insecure: true`` to disable the server certificate verification by the client. See :ref:`SETTINGS <patronictl_settings>` for a detailed description of the TLS client parameters.
+
+Protecting the PostgreSQL database proper from unauthorized access is beyond the scope of this document and is covered in https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/client-authentication.html