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Teleport

Per-session MFA

Version 11.x
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Teleport - Multi-Factor SSH and Kubectl Authentication

Teleport - Multi-Factor SSH and Kubectl Authentication

Length: 01:29

Teleport supports requiring additional multi-factor authentication checks when starting new:

  • SSH connections (a single tsh call)
  • Kubernetes sessions (a single kubectl call)
  • Database sessions (a single tsh db connect call)
  • Desktop sessions

This is an advanced security feature that protects users against compromises of their on-disk Teleport certificates.

In addition to per-session MFA, enable login MFA in your SSO provider and/or for all local Teleport users to improve security.

Per-session MFA checks were introduced in Teleport v6.1. To enforce the checks, you must update all teleport binaries in your deployment. If only Auth and Proxy services are updated, these checks will not be properly enforced. Additionally, only v6.1 or newer tsh binaries implement per-session MFA checks.

Per-session MFA for Desktop Access was introduced in Teleport 9.

Prerequisites

  • A running Teleport cluster. For details on how to set this up, see one of our Getting Started guides.

  • The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 11.3.2.

    tctl version
    Teleport v11.3.2 go1.19
    tsh version
    Teleport v11.3.2 go1.19

    See Installation for details.

  • A running Teleport cluster. For details on how to set this up, see our Enterprise Getting Started guide.

  • The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 11.3.2, which you can download by visiting the customer portal.

    tctl version
    Teleport v11.3.2 go1.19
    tsh version
    Teleport v11.3.2 go1.19

  • A Teleport Cloud account. If you do not have one, visit the sign up page to begin your free trial.

  • The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool version >= 11.2.1. To download these tools, visit the Downloads page.

    tctl version
    Teleport v11.2.1 go1.19
    tsh version
    Teleport v11.2.1 go1.19

To 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  11.3.2
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.

To connect to Teleport, log in to your cluster using tsh, then use tctl remotely:

tsh login --proxy=myinstance.teleport.sh [email protected]
tctl status
Cluster  myinstance.teleport.sh
Version  11.2.1
CA pin   sha256:sha-hash-here

You must run subsequent tctl commands in this guide on your local machine.

Per-session MFA with FIPS

Teleport FIPS builds disable local users. To configure WebAuthn in order to use per-session MFA with FIPS builds, provide the following in your teleport.yaml:

teleport:
  auth_service:
    local_auth: false
    second_factor: optional
    webauthn:
      rp_id: teleport.example.com

Configure per-session MFA

Per-session MFA can be enforced cluster-wide or only for some specific roles.

Cluster-wide

To enforce MFA checks for all roles, edit your cluster authentication configuration:

Update teleport.yaml on the Auth Server to include the following content:

auth_service:
  authentication:
    # require per-session MFA cluster-wide
    require_session_mfa: yes

Obtain your existing cluster_auth_preference resource:

tctl get cap > cap.yaml

If you have not defined a cluster_auth_preference, cap.yaml will be blank.

Ensure that cap.yaml contains the following content:

kind: cluster_auth_preference
metadata:
  name: cluster-auth-preference
spec:
  require_session_mfa: true
version: v2

Create the resource:

tctl create -f cap.yaml

Per role

To enforce MFA checks for a specific role, update the role to contain:

kind: role
version: v3
metadata:
  name: example-role-with-mfa
spec:
  options:
    # require per-session MFA for this role
    require_session_mfa: true
  allow:
    ...
  deny:
    ...

Role-specific enforcement only applies when accessing resources matching a role's allow section.

Roles example

Let's walk through an example of setting up per-session MFA checks for roles.

Jerry is an engineer with access to the company infrastructure. The infrastructure is split into development and production environments. Security engineer Olga wants to enforce MFA checks for accessing production servers. Development servers don't require this to reduce engineers' friction.

Olga defines two Teleport roles: access-dev and access-prod:

# access-dev.yaml
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-dev
spec:
  allow:
    node_labels:
      env: dev
    kubernetes_labels:
      env: dev
    db_labels:
      'env': dev
    db_users:
    - '*'
    db_names:
    - '*'
  deny: {}
---
# access-prod.yaml
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-prod
spec:
  options:
    # require per-session MFA for production access
    require_session_mfa: true
  allow:
    node_labels:
      env: prod
    kubernetes_labels:
      env: prod
    db_labels:
      'env': prod
    db_users:
    - '*'
    db_names:
    - '*'
  deny: {}

Olga then assigns both roles to all engineers, including Jerry.

When Jerry logs into node dev1.example.com (with label env: dev), nothing special happens:

tsh ssh dev1.example.com
[email protected] >

But when Jerry logs into node prod3.example.com (with label env: prod), he gets prompted for an MFA check:

tsh ssh prod3.example.com
Tap any security key <tap>
[email protected] >
OTP

If you are using tsh in a constrained environment, you can tell it to use OTP by doing tsh --mfa-mode=otp ssh prod3.example.com.

OTP can only be used with per-session MFA when using the tsh client to establish connections. A hardware MFA key is required for using per-session MFA with Teleport's Web UI.

If per-session MFA was enabled cluster-wide, Jerry would be prompted for MFA even when logging into dev1.example.com.

Per-session MFA for Database Access

Database Access supports per-connection MFA. When Jerry connects to the database prod-mysql-instance (with label env: prod), he gets prompted for an MFA check for each tsh db connect or tsh proxy db call:

tsh db connect prod-mysql-instance
Tap any security key
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 10002
Server version: 8.0.0-Teleport (Ubuntu)
Copyright (c) 2000, 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.
mysql>

Limitations

Current limitations for this feature are:

  • For SSH, the tsh client must be used for per-session MFA. (The OpenSSH ssh client does not work with per-session MFA).
  • Only kubectl supports per-session WebAuthn authentication for Kubernetes.
  • Application access clients don't support per-session MFA authentication yet, although cluster and role configuration applies to them. If you enable per-session MFA checks cluster-wide, you will not be able to use Application access. We're working on integrating per-session MFA checks for these clients.
  • For Desktop Access, only WebAuthn devices are supported.
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