Teleport

Teleport Access Requests with Email

Available for:
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. For details on how to set this up, see the Enterprise Getting Started guide.
The Enterprise tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 14.2.0. You can download these tools by visiting your Teleport account. You can verify the tools you have installed by running the following commands:
```
tctl version
Teleport Enterprise v14.2.0 go1.21

tsh version
Teleport v14.2.0 go1.21
```

A Teleport Enterprise Cloud account. If you do not have one, visit the signup page to begin a free trial of Teleport Team and upgrade to Teleport Enterprise Cloud.
The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 14.1.3. To download these tools, visit the Downloads page.
```
tctl version
Teleport Enterprise v14.1.3 go1.21

tsh version
Teleport v14.1.3 go1.21
```

Access to an SMTP service. The Teleport email plugin supports either Mailgun or a generic SMTP service that authenticates via username and password.
Either a Linux host or Kubernetes cluster where you will run the email plugin.

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.

To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login, then verify that you can run tctl commands using your current credentials. tctl is supported on macOS and Linux machines. For example:
```
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=[email protected]
tctl status
Cluster  teleport.example.com
Version  14.2.0
CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
```
If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequent tctl commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.

Step 1/7. Define RBAC resources

Before you set up the email plugin, 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 createdrole '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 appropriate commands for your authentication provider:

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
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your github authentication connector:
```
tctl get github/github --with-secrets > github.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the github.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the github.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit github.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the teams_to_roles section.

The team you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the team must include your user account and should be the smallest team possible within your organization.

Here is an example:
```
  teams_to_roles:
    - organization: octocats
      team: admins
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer
```
Apply your changes:
```
tctl create -f github.yaml
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your saml configuration resource:
```
tctl get --with-secrets saml/mysaml > saml.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the saml.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the saml.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit saml.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the attributes_to_roles section.

The attribute you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the group must include your user account and should be the smallest group possible within your organization.

Here is an example:
```
  attributes_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer
```
Apply your changes:
```
tctl create -f saml.yaml
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your oidc configuration resource:
```
tctl get oidc/myoidc --with-secrets > oidc.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the oidc.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the oidc.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit oidc.yaml, adding editor-reviewer to the claims_to_roles section.

The claim you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the group must include your user account and should be the smallest group possible within your organization.

Here is an example:
```
  claims_to_roles:
    - name: "groups"
      value: "my-group"
      roles:
        - access
+       - editor-reviewer
```
Apply your changes:
```
tctl create -f oidc.yaml
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign 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

If you are using a local SMTP server to test the plugin, you should install the plugin on your local machine to ensure the plugin can connect to the SMTP server and perform any necessary DNS lookups to send email.

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

We currently only provide linux-amd64 binaries. You can also compile these plugins from source. You can run the plugin from a remote host or your local development machine.

curl -L -O https://get.gravitational.com/teleport-access-email-v14.2.0-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
tar -xzf teleport-access-email-v14.2.0-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
cd teleport-access-email
sudo ./install

Make sure the binary is installed:

teleport-email version
teleport-email v14.2.0 git:teleport-email-v14.2.0-fffffffff go1.21

We currently only provide Docker images for linux-amd64. Pull the Docker image for the latest access request plugin by running the following command:

docker pull public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-email:14.2.0

Make sure the plugin is installed by running the following command:

docker run public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-email:14.2.0 version
teleport-email v14.2.0 git:teleport-email-v14.2.0-api/14.0.0-gd1e081e 1.21

For a list of available tags, visit Amazon ECR Public Gallery.

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

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

Move the teleport-email binary into your PATH.

Make sure the binary is installed:

teleport-email version
teleport-email v14.2.0 git:teleport-email-v14.2.0-fffffffff go1.21

Allow Helm to install charts that are hosted in the Teleport Helm repository:

helm repo add teleport https://charts.releases.teleport.dev

Update the cache of charts from the remote repository:

helm repo update

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 running a self-hosted Teleport Enterprise deployment and 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 appropriate commands for your authentication provider:

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
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your github authentication connector:
```
tctl get github/github --with-secrets > github.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the github.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the github.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit github.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the teams_to_roles section.

The team you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the team must include your user account and should be the smallest team possible within your organization.

Here is an example:
```
  teams_to_roles:
    - organization: octocats
      team: admins
      roles:
        - access
+       - access-plugin-impersonator
```
Apply your changes:
```
tctl create -f github.yaml
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your saml configuration resource:
```
tctl get --with-secrets saml/mysaml > saml.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the saml.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the saml.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit saml.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the attributes_to_roles section.

The attribute you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the group must include your user account and should be the smallest group possible within your organization.

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
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Retrieve your oidc configuration resource:
```
tctl get oidc/myoidc --with-secrets > oidc.yaml
```
Note that the --with-secrets flag adds the value of spec.signing_key_pair.private_key to the oidc.yaml file. Because this key contains a sensitive value, you should remove the oidc.yaml file immediately after updating the resource.
Edit oidc.yaml, adding access-plugin-impersonator to the claims_to_roles section.

The claim you should map to this role depends on how you have designed your organization's role-based access controls (RBAC). However, the group must include your user account and should be the smallest group possible within your organization.

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
```
Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign 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.

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.

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.

Note that you cannot issue certificates that are valid longer than your existing credentials. For example, to issue certificates with a 1000-hour TTL, you must be logged in with a session that is valid for at least 1000 hours. This means your user must have a role allowing a max_session_ttl of at least 1000 hours (60000 minutes), and you must specify a --ttl when logging in:

tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --ttl=60060

The rest of this guide assumes that you have placed any files generated by this command into /var/lib/teleport/plugins/email for later reference when configuring the plugin:

create a data directory to hold certificate files for the plugin.
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/teleport/plugins/email
sudo mv auth.* /var/lib/teleport/plugins/email

Create a Kubernetes secret that contains the Teleport identity file:

kubectl -n teleport create secret generic --from-file=auth.pem teleport-plugin-email-identity

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.

Create a config file

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

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

The email plugin Helm Chart uses a YAML values file to configure the plugin. On your local workstation, create a file called teleport-email-helm.yaml based on the following example:

teleport:
  address: teleport.example.com:443
  identitySecretName: ""
  identitySecretName: teleport-plugin-email-identity

mailgun:
  enabled: false
  domain: ""
  privateKey: ""
  privateKeyFromSecret: ""
  privateKeySecretPath: "mailgunPrivateKey"

smtp:
  enabled: false
  host: ""
  port: 587
  username: ""
  password: ""
  passwordFromSecret: ""
  passwordSecretPath: "smtpPassword"
  starttlsPolicy: "mandatory"

delivery:
  sender: ""
  recipients: []

roleToRecipients: {}

secretVolumeName: "password-file"

Edit the configuration file

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.

If you are deploying the email plugin on a Linux host:

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

If you are deploying the email plugin on Kubernetes:

Write your Mailgun private key to a local file called mailgun-private-key.
Create a Kubernetes secret from the file:

kubectl -n teleport create secret generic mailgun-private-key --from-file=mailgun-private-key

Assign mailgun.privateKeyFromSecret to 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.

If you are running the email plugin on a Linux host, 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 deploying the email plugin on Kubernetes:

Write your SMTP service's password a local file called smtp-password.txt.
Create a Kubernetes secret from the file:

kubectl -n teleport create secret generic smtp-password --from-file=smtp-password

Assign smtp.passwordFromSecret to smtp-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.

For Kubernetes deployments, starttls_policy is called smtp.starttlsPolicy in the Helm values file for the email plugin.

`[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 (roleToRecipients for Helm users) configures 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]"

roleToRecipients:
  "*": ["[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"

roleToRecipients:
  "*": "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]"]

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 = "sandbox123abc.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".

# teleport-email-helm.yaml
teleport:
  address: "teleport.example.com:443"
  identitySecretName: teleport-plugin-email-identity

mailgun:
  domain: "sandbox123abc.mailgun.org" 
  privateKeyFromSecret: "mailgun-private-key"                                     
# As an alternative, you can use SMTP server credentials:
#
# smtp:
#   host: "smtp.gmail.com"
#   port: 587
#   username: "[email protected]"
#   passwordFromSecret: "smtp-password"

delivery:
  sender: "[email protected]" 

roleToRecipients:
  "*": "[email protected]"
  "editor": ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"]

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:80INFO   Plugin is ready email/app.go:101

Start the plugin:

docker run -v <path-to-config>:/etc/teleport-email.toml public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-email:14.2.0 start

Install the plugin:

helm upgrade --install teleport-plugin-email teleport/teleport-plugin-email --values teleport-email-helm.yaml

To inspect the plugin's logs, use the following command:

kubectl logs deploy/teleport-plugin-email

Debug logs can be enabled by setting log.severity to DEBUG in teleport-email-helm.yaml and executing the helm upgrade ... command above again. Then you can restart the plugin with the following command:

kubectl rollout restart deployment teleport-plugin-email

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":

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

This section is only relevant if you are running the Teleport email plugin on a Linux host.

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