Authentication
Kibana 4 uses HTTP Basic Authentication to authenticate to Elasticsearch with Shield. For convenience, Shield includes a default role with Kibana (http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/shield/current/_shield_with_kibana_4.html#_shield_configuration_2).
Encryption between Kibana 4 and Elasticsearch
You can optionally set encryption on Shield-enabled requests from Kibana 4. We recommend you do that, so that credentials are not passed in the clear. See http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/shield/current/_shield_with_kibana_4.html#_from_the_kibana_4_server_to_elasticsearch for additional details.
Data-level security
In the initial release for Kibana 4, only data-level security is provided. This means that if a user sees a chart, but Elasticsearch permissions do not allow the user to execute a query that populates the chart, it will be empty for that user. At this time, there is no view-level security for Kibana based on Shield, but we are considering this enhancement for future versions.