I'd like to secure elasticsearch without SSL reason being, it's just too much work to maintain certificates ..
Is there a way to secure ES by setting up userid/password as we could for example with redis?
I see bunch of meos index and I think some bots are deleting our .kibana index from time to time.
Yes, you've been meowed. See this thread for more detailed information.
As soon as you turn on XPack security, you have to configure TLS/SSL for internode-communication, that's a requirement. So it is not possible to just have basic authentication turned on and no SSL between the nodes UNLESS you have a single node. But since you're worried about too much work to maintain certificates, I assume you have several nodes, otherwise it wouldn't be an issue.
An alternative if you just want BASIC auth is to use the free version of the Readonly REST plugin.
