Teleport Users

Types of Users

Unlike traditional SSH, Teleport introduces the concept of a User Account. A User Account is not the same as SSH login. Instead each Teleport User is associated with another account which is used to authenticate the user.

For community edition users, these will be OS users which are administered outside of Teleport on each cluster node. For example, there can be a Teleport user "joe" who can be given permission to login as "root" to a specific subset of nodes. Another user "juliet" could be given permission to OS users "root" and to "nginx". Teleport does not have knowledge of the OS Users so it expects both "root" and "nginx" to exist on the node.

For enterprise edition users, these can be stored in an external identity sources such as OKTA, Active Directory, OneLogin, G Suite, or OIDC. Read the Enterprise Guide to learn more.

Teleport supports two types of user accounts: Local Users and External Users.

Local users

Local users are created and stored in Teleport's own identity storage in the Auth Server.

Let's look at this table:

To add a new user to Teleport, you have to use the tctl tool on the same node where the auth server is running, i.e. teleport was started with --roles=auth .

A cluster administrator must create account entries for every Teleport user with tctl users add. Every Teleport User must be associated with a list of one or more machine-level OS usernames it can authenticate as during a login. This list is called "user mappings".

The diagram shows the following mappings. A couple of noteworthy things from this example:

• Teleport User sandra does not have access to grav-02 through Teleport because ops is not an OS username on that node.
• Teleport User joe has access to all nodes because the OS user root is present on all nodes.

Teleport supports second factor authentication (2FA) when using a local auth connector and it is enforced by default.

There are two types of 2FA supported:

• TOTP - e.g. Google Authenticator
• U2F - e.g. YubiKey

TOTP is the default. You can use Google Authenticator or Authy or any other TOTP client.

External users

External users are users stored elsewhere within an organization. Examples include Github, Active Directory (AD), OIDC, or any identity store with an OpenID/OAuth2 or SAML endpoint.

Multiple Identity Sources

It is possible to have multiple identity sources configured for a Teleport cluster. In this case, an identity source (called a "connector") will have to be passed to tsh --auth=connector_name login.

The local users connector can be specified via tsh --auth=local login.

User Roles

Unlike traditional SSH, each Teleport user account is assigned a role . Having roles allows Teleport to implement role-based access control (RBAC), i.e. assign users to groups (roles) and restrict each role to a subset of actions on a subset of nodes in a cluster.

More Concepts

• Architecture Overview
• Teleport Auth
• Teleport Nodes
• Teleport Proxy