In this post I will be announcing a new open source project: Teleport Connect. It is a dedicated secure web browser for accessing cloud infrastructure. But first, let me explain why we've decided to build it, starting with a bit of historical context. As a kid I have always enjoyed imagining the process of programming to having a conversation with a machine. The REPL loop is the most obvious example of this interaction. As our code grows it no longer fits in a REPL environment.

Running a Kubernetes-based infrastructure is challenging and complex. Administrators often lament how complicated performance optimization and monitoring are, which can lead to problems in production. Additionally, even finely-tuned Kubernetes deployments can encounter sporadic issues. When Kubernetes starts behaving in strange ways, digging into logs can help you uncover breadcrumbs. These contextual hints can help lead you to possible solutions.

SSH was designed in 1995, LDAP was initially developed in 1993, and role-based access control was introduced in 1992. The concept of least privilege was introduced in 1975. With all of these existing technologies, when are modern privileged access management solutions necessary? This is a common question asked when we pitch the idea of modern privileged access management (PAM).

The SSH protocol offers multiple authentication options: passwords, public keys and certificates. Certificate-based authentication is the most secure of them all, but historically, it has been the most complicated to set up. This tutorial guides you through simple steps to configure certificate-based authentication for an OpenSSH server. First, let's consider the differences between certificates and keys. As you can see, an SSH key is a binary proposition.

The modern human likely has profiles on dozens of applications. Whether it’s social media applications, music/video streaming, or workspace resources, each of us must manage accounts that contain personal information. Over time, these siloed applications have become increasingly connected. Twitter allows news sites to directly tweet, Discord searches Facebook for suggested friends, and Jira creates user accounts using Github profiles.

Kubernetes supports several authorization methods, but the best-known and one of the most versatile is RBAC. Role-based access control implements a mechanism for restricting and controlling user access to resources of a system by using roles attached to users.

Many businesses use virtual private networks (VPNs) to provide secure remote access to their systems, but this has increasingly become a liability as more people switch to remote work. The greater demands placed on VPNs to offer safe access can expose organizations and employees to security vulnerabilities. In order to better protect their data and systems, organizations may need to seek alternatives to VPNs.

This blog is Part IV in a series about identity-based access management of AWS resources. In Part I, we covered how to use OSS Teleport to access Amazon EC2 instances running in private subnets. Part II explained implementing identity-based access via SSO integration with Okta. Part III covered the steps to configure privilege escalation for just-in-time access requests. In Part IV, we will guide you through the steps to configure SSH session recording and auditing.

As part of our Teleport 9 release, we added support for three more databases: Redis, MariaDB, and Microsoft SQL Server. In this post we’ll cover the steps needed to protect your Redis instance using Teleport Database Access. Teleport Database Access allows you to easily secure your databases using security best practices such as identity-based SSO, short-lived certificates for engineers or service accounts, multi-factor authentication, RBAC, and audit of all access and queries.

This blog is part three in a series about identity-based access and management of AWS resources. In Part I, we covered how to use OSS Teleport to access Amazon EC2 instances running in private subnets. Part II explained implementing identity-based access via SSO integration with Okta. In Part III, we will guide you through the steps to configure privilege escalation for just-in-time access requests.

Kubectl is the default command-line tool for Kubernetes. It makes it easier to use the Kubernetes API and manipulate Kubernetes resources, allowing you to control Kubernetes clusters and run commands to deploy applications, manage cluster resources, and view logs. This guide will look at how best to integrate the most common and useful kubectl commands into your workflows, as well as provide some helpful tools for further optimization.

The DevOps workflow is all about automation driven by machine-to-machine access. To maintain the automated DevOps pipeline, engineers configure service accounts with credentials such as passwords, API tokens, certificates, etc. The issue is that engineers often fall into the security mispractice of creating long-lived credentials for service accounts to facilitate automation and lessen manual intervention.

This blog post was originally released on 08/26/20. What’s worse than an unsafe private key? An unsafe public key. The “secure” in secure shell comes from the combination of hashing, symmetric encryption, and asymmetric encryption. Together, SSH uses cryptographic primitives to safely connect clients and servers. In the 25 years since its founding, computing power and speeds in accordance with Moore’s Law have necessitated increasingly complicated low-level algorithms.

The four-eyes principle means an activity must be approved by two people, or from Argus Panoptes if the ancient Greeks needed access controls. This principle is commonly used in both routine and non-routine scenarios. On the routine side are “Business Execution” processes. Here the Four Eyes principle is used to stop negative outcomes as the result of poor execution of a regular business task.

In this blog post we're excited to announce Machine ID, an easy way for developers to secure machine-to-machine communications based on X.509 and SSH certificates. But before we go deeper, let’s step back and think about what’s happening during a hacking attempt. Every security breach has two things in common. Addressing cybersecurity challenges requires a solution to both.

What is an SSH bastion and how is this different from an SSH jump server or an SSH proxy? In this post, we’ll answer this question and will show you how to set it up using two popular open source projects. Both Teleport and OpenSSH support bastions, and they are extremely similar as they are both single-binary Linux daemons. Both require a simple configuration file usually stored somewhere under /etc/.