Teleport

Teleport Access Requests with Email

Enterprise
Cloud

This guide will explain how to set up Teleport to send Just-in-Time Access Request notifications to users via email. Since all organizations use email for at least some of their communications, Teleport's email plugin makes it straightforward to integrate Access Requests into your existing workflows, letting you implement security best practices without compromising productivity.

Prerequisites

A running Teleport Enterprise cluster, including the Auth Service and Proxy Service. For details on how to set this up, see our Enterprise Getting Started guide.
The Enterprise tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 13.0.3, which you can download by visiting your Teleport account.
```
tctl version
Teleport Enterprise v13.0.3 go1.20
tsh version
Teleport v13.0.3 go1.20
```

Cloud is not available for Teleport v.
Please use the latest version of Teleport Enterprise documentation.

Access to an SMTP service. The Teleport email plugin supports either Mailgun or a generic SMTP service that authenticates via username and password.

Protecting your email account

The Teleport plugin needs to use a username and password to authenticate to your SMTP service. To mitigate the risk of these credentials being leaked, you should set up a dedicated email account for the Teleport plugin and rotate the password regularly.

Make sure you can connect to Teleport. Log in to your cluster using tsh, then use tctl remotely:
```
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com [email protected]
tctl status
Cluster  teleport.example.com
Version  13.0.3
CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
```
You can run subsequent tctl commands in this guide on your local machine.
For full privileges, you can also run tctl commands on your Auth Service host.

Step 1/7. Define RBAC resources

Before you set up the email plugin, you will need to enable Role Access Requests in your Teleport cluster.

For the purpose of this guide, we will define an editor-requester role, which can request the built-in editor role, and an editor-reviewer role that can review requests for the editor role.

Create a file called editor-request-rbac.yaml with the following content:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: editor-reviewer
spec:
  allow:
    review_requests:
      roles: ['editor']
---
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: editor-requester
spec:
  allow:
    request:
      roles: ['editor']
      thresholds:
        - approve: 1
          deny: 1

Create the roles you defined:

tctl create -f editor-request-rbac.yaml
role 'editor-reviewer' has been created
role 'editor-requester' has been created

Allow yourself to review requests by users with the editor-requester role by assigning yourself the editor-reviewer role.

Assign the editor-reviewer role to your Teleport user by running the following commands, depending on whether you authenticate as a local Teleport user or via the github, saml, or oidc authentication connectors:

Retrieve your local user's configuration resource:

tctl get users/$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') > out.yaml

Edit out.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the list of existing roles:

  roles:
   - access
   - auditor
   - editor
+  - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f out.yaml

Retrieve your github configuration resource:

tctl get github/github --with-secrets > github.yaml

Edit github.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the teams_to_roles section. The team you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest team possible within your organization. This team must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  teams_to_roles:
    - organization: octocats
      team: admins
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f github.yaml

Warning

Note the --with-secrets flag in the tctl get command. This adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to github.yaml. This is a sensitive value, so take precautions when creating this file and remove it after updating the resource.

Retrieve your saml configuration resource:

tctl get --with-secrets saml/mysaml > saml.yaml

Edit saml.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the attributes_to_roles section. The attribute you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  attributes_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f saml.yaml

Warning

Note the --with-secrets flag in the tctl get command. This adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to saml.yaml. This is a sensitive value, so take precautions when creating this file and remove it after updating the resource.

Retrieve your oidc configuration resource:

tctl get oidc/myoidc --with-secrets > oidc.yaml

Edit oidc.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the claims_to_roles section. The claim you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  claims_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f oidc.yaml

Warning

Note the --with-secrets flag in the tctl get command. This adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to oidc.yaml. This is a sensitive value, so take precautions when creating this file and remove it after updating the resource.

Log out of your Teleport cluster and log in again to assume the new role.

Create a user called myuser who has the editor-requester role. This user cannot edit your cluster configuration unless they request the editor role:

tctl users add myuser --roles=editor-requester

tctl will print an invitation URL to your terminal. Visit the URL and log in as myuser for the first time, registering credentials as configured for your Teleport cluster.

Later in this guide, you will have myuser request the editor role so you can review the request using the Teleport plugin.

Step 2/7. Install the Teleport email plugin

We recommend installing Teleport plugins on the same host as the Teleport Proxy Service. This is an ideal location as plugins have a low memory footprint, and will require both public internet access and Teleport Auth Service access.

If you are using a local SMTP server to test the plugin, you should install the plugin on your local machine. This is because the plugin needs to dial out to your SMTP server and perform any necessary DNS lookups in order to send email.

Your Teleport cluster does not need to perform DNS lookups for your plugin, as the plugin dials out to the Proxy Service or Auth Service.

We currently only provide Linux amd64 binaries. You can also compile the plugin from source.

curl -L https://get.gravitational.com/teleport-access-email-v13.0.3-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
tar -xzf teleport-access-email-v13.0.3-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
cd teleport-access-email
./install

To install from source you need git and go installed. If you do not have Go installed, visit the Go downloads page.

Checkout teleport-plugins
git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport-plugins.git
cd teleport-plugins/access/email
make

Move the teleport-email binary from teleport-plugins/access/email/build into a directory in your PATH.

Ensure that the plugin is installed correctly:

teleport-email version

Step 3/7. Create a user and role for the plugin

Teleport's Access Request plugins authenticate to your Teleport cluster as a user with permissions to list and read Access Requests. This way, plugins can retrieve Access Requests from the Teleport Auth Service and present them to reviewers.

Define a user and role called access-plugin by adding the following content to a file called access-plugin.yaml:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-plugin
spec:
  allow:
    rules:
      - resources: ['access_request']
        verbs: ['list', 'read']
      - resources: ['access_plugin_data']
        verbs: ['update']
---
kind: user
metadata:
  name: access-plugin
spec:
  roles: ['access-plugin']
version: v2

Create the user and role:

tctl create -f access-plugin.yaml

As with all Teleport users, the Teleport Auth Service authenticates the access-plugin user by issuing short-lived TLS credentials. In this case, we will need to request the credentials manually by impersonating the access-plugin role and user.

If you are using tctl from the Auth Service host, you will already have impersonation privileges.

To grant your user impersonation privileges for access-plugin, define a role called access-plugin-impersonator by pasting the following YAML document into a file called access-plugin-impersonator.yaml:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-plugin-impersonator
spec:
  allow:
    impersonate:
      roles:
      - access-plugin
      users:
      - access-plugin

Create the access-plugin-impersonator role:

tctl create -f access-plugin-impersonator.yaml

Assign the access-plugin-impersonator role to your Teleport user by running the following commands, depending on whether you authenticate as a local Teleport user or via the github, saml, or oidc authentication connectors:

Retrieve your local user's configuration resource:

tctl get users/$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') > out.yaml

Edit out.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the list of existing roles:

  roles:
   - access
   - auditor
   - editor
+  - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f out.yaml

Retrieve your github configuration resource:

tctl get github/github --with-secrets > github.yaml

Edit github.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the teams_to_roles section. The team you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest team possible within your organization. This team must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  teams_to_roles:
    - organization: octocats
      team: admins
      roles:
        - access
+       - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f github.yaml

Warning

Retrieve your saml configuration resource:

tctl get --with-secrets saml/mysaml > saml.yaml

Edit saml.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the attributes_to_roles section. The attribute you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  attributes_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f saml.yaml

Warning

Retrieve your oidc configuration resource:

tctl get oidc/myoidc --with-secrets > oidc.yaml

Edit oidc.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the claims_to_roles section. The claim you will map to this role will depend on how you have designed your organization's RBAC, but it should be the smallest group possible within your organization. This group must also include your user.

Here is an example:

  claims_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - access-plugin-impersonator

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f oidc.yaml

Warning

Log out of your Teleport cluster and log in again to assume the new role.

You will now be able to generate signed certificates for the access-plugin role and user.

Step 4/7. Export the access plugin identity

Like all Teleport users, access-plugin needs signed credentials in order to connect to your Teleport cluster. You will use the tctl auth sign command to request these credentials for your plugin.

The following tctl auth sign command impersonates the access-plugin user, generates signed credentials, and writes an identity file to the local directory:

tctl auth sign --user=access-plugin --out=auth.pem

The plugin connects to the Teleport Auth Service's gRPC endpoint over TLS.

The identity file, auth.pem, includes both TLS and SSH credentials. The plugin uses the SSH credentials to connect to the Proxy Service, which establishes a reverse tunnel connection to the Auth Service. The plugin uses this reverse tunnel, along with your TLS credentials, to connect to the Auth Service's gRPC endpoint.

You will refer to this file later when configuring the plugin.

Certificate Lifetime

By default, tctl auth sign produces certificates with a relatively short lifetime. For production deployments, we suggest using Machine ID to programmatically issue and renew certificates for your plugin. See our Machine ID getting started guide to learn more.

Step 5/7. Configure the plugin

At this point, you have generated credentials that the email plugin will use to connect to Teleport. You will now configure the plugin to use these credentials to receive Access Request notifications from Teleport and email them to your chosen recipients.

The Teleport email plugin uses a config file in TOML format. Generate a boilerplate config by running the following command:

teleport-email configure | sudo tee /etc/teleport-email.toml

Edit the configuration file for your environment. We will show you how to set each value below.

`[teleport]`

addr: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud tenant (e.g., teleport.example.com:443 or mytenant.teleport.sh:443).

identity: Fill this in with the path to the identity file you exported earlier.

client_key, client_crt, root_cas: Comment these out, since we are not using them in this configuration.

address: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud tenant (e.g., teleport.example.com:443 or mytenant.teleport.sh:443).

identitySecretName: Fill in the identitySecretName field with the name of the Kubernetes secret you created earlier.

`[mailgun]` or `[smtp]`

Provide the credentials for your SMTP service depending on whether you are using Mailgun or SMTP service.

In the mailgun section, assign domain to the domain name and subdomain of your Mailgun account. Assign private_key to your Mailgun private key.

Assign host to the fully qualified domain name of your SMTP service, omitting the URL scheme and port. (If you're using a local SMTP server for testing, use "localhost" for host.) Assign port to the port of your SMTP service, then fill in username and password.

You can also save your password to a separate file and assign password_file to the file's path. The plugin reads the file and uses the file's content as the password.

If you are testing the email plugin against a trusted internal SMTP server where you would rather not use TLS—e.g., a local SMTP server on your development machine—you can assign the starttls_policy setting to disabled (always disable TLS) or opportunistic (disable TLS if the server does not advertise the STARTTLS extension). The default is to always enforce TLS, and you should leave this setting unassigned unless you know what you are doing and understand the risks.

`[delivery]`

Assign sender to the email address from which you would like the Teleport plugin to send messages.

`[role_to_recipients]`

The role_to_recipients map configure the recipients that the email plugin will notify when a user requests access to a specific role. When the plugin receives an Access Request from the Auth Service, it will look up the role being requested and identify the recipients to notify.

Here is an example of a role_to_recipients map:

[role_to_recipients]
"*" = ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"]
"dev" = "[email protected]"
"dba" = "[email protected]"

In the role_to_recipients map, each key is the name of a Teleport role. Each value configures the recipients the plugin will email when it receives an Access Request for that role. The value can be a single string or an array of strings. Each string must be an email address.

The role_to_recipients map must also include an entry for "*", which the plugin looks up if no other entry matches a given role name. In the example above, requests for roles aside from dev and dba will notify [email protected] and [email protected].

Users can suggest reviewers when they create an Access Request, e.g.,:

tsh request create --roles=dbadmin [email protected],[email protected]

If an Access Request includes suggested reviewers, the email plugin will add these to the list of recipients to notify. If a suggested reviewer is an email address, the plugin will send a message to that recipient in addition to those configured in role_to_recipients.

Configure the email plugin to notify you when a user requests the editor role by adding the following to your role_to_recipients config, replacing YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS with the appropriate address:

[role_to_recipients]
"*" = "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS"
"editor" = "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS"

If you do not plan to use role-to-recipient mapping, you can configure the Teleport email plugin to notify a static list of recipients for every Access Request event by using the delivery.recipients field:

[delivery]
recipients = ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"]

If you use delivery.recipients, you must remove the role_to_recipients configuration section. Behind the scenes, delivery.recipients assigns the recipient list to a role_to_recipients mapping under the wildcard value "*".

You configuration should resemble the following:

# /etc/teleport-email.toml
[teleport]
addr = "example.com:443"
identity = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/email/auth_id"

[mailgun]
domain = "sandboxbd81caddef744a69be0e5b544ab0c3bd.mailgun.org" 
private_key = "xoxb-fakekey62b0eac53565a38c8cc0316f6"                                     

# As an alternative, you can use SMTP server credentials:
#
# [smtp]
# host = "smtp.gmail.com"
# port = 587
# username = "[email protected]"
# password = ""
# password_file = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/email/smtp_password"

[delivery]
sender = "[email protected]" 

[role_to_recipients]
"*" = "[email protected]"
"editor" = ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"]

[log]
output = "stderr" # Logger output. Could be "stdout", "stderr" or "/var/lib/teleport/email.log"
severity = "INFO" # Logger severity. Could be "INFO", "ERROR", "DEBUG" or "WARN".

Step 6/7. Test the email plugin

After finishing your configuration, you can now run the plugin and test your email-based Access Request flow:

teleport-email start

If everything works as expected, the log output should look like this:

teleport-email start
INFO   Starting Teleport Access Email Plugin (): email/app.go:80
INFO   Plugin is ready email/app.go:101

Create an Access Request

A Teleport admin can create an Access Request for another user with tctl:

tctl request create myuser --roles=editor

Users can use tsh to create an Access Request and log in with approved roles:

tsh request create --roles=editor
Seeking request approval... (id: 8f77d2d1-2bbf-4031-a300-58926237a807)

Users can request access using the Web UI by visiting the "Access Requests" tab and clicking "New Request":

Creating an Access Request using the Web UI

The recipients you configured earlier should receive notifications of the request by email.

Resolve the request

Once you receive an Access Request message, click the link to visit Teleport and approve or deny the request:

You can also review an Access Request from the command line:

Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tctl request approve REQUEST_ID
tctl request deny REQUEST_ID

Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tsh request review --approve REQUEST_ID
tsh request review --deny REQUEST_ID

Step 7/7. Set up systemd

In production, we recommend starting the Teleport plugin daemon via an init system like systemd. Here's the recommended Teleport plugin service unit file for systemd:

[Unit]
Description=Teleport Email Plugin
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/teleport-email start --config=/etc/teleport-email.toml
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
PIDFile=/run/teleport-email.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save this as teleport-email.service in either /usr/lib/systemd/system/ or another unit file load path supported by systemd.

Enable and start the plugin:

sudo systemctl enable teleport-email
sudo systemctl start teleport-email

Feedback

If you have any issues with this plugin please create an issue on GitHub.

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Teleport Access Requests with Email

Prerequisites

Step 1/7. Define RBAC resources

Step 2/7. Install the Teleport email plugin

Step 3/7. Create a user and role for the plugin

Step 4/7. Export the access plugin identity

Step 5/7. Configure the plugin

[teleport]

[mailgun] or [smtp]

[delivery]

[role_to_recipients]

Step 6/7. Test the email plugin

Create an Access Request

Resolve the request

Step 7/7. Set up systemd

Feedback

`[teleport]`

`[mailgun]` or `[smtp]`

`[delivery]`

`[role_to_recipients]`