Trusted Clusters Architecture

Teleport can partition compute infrastructure into multiple clusters. A cluster is a group of Teleport connected resources. Each cluster manages a set of certificate authorities (CAs) for its users and resources.

Trusted Clusters allow the users of one cluster, the root cluster, to access resources registered with another cluster, the leaf cluster, while remaining authenticated with only a single Auth Service. The leaf cluster can be running behind a firewall without any ingress ports open.

Uses for Trusted Clusters include:

• Managed service providers (MSP) remotely managing the infrastructure of their clients.
• Device manufacturers remotely maintaining computing appliances deployed on premises.
• Large cloud software vendors managing multiple data centers.

Multi-Data-center Clusters

In the example below, there are three independent clusters:

• Cluster sso.example.com is a root cluster. This cluster can be used as a single-sign-on entry point for your organization. It can have it's own independent resources connected to it, or be used just for audit logs collection and single-sign-on.
• Clusters us-east-1a and us-east-1b are two independent clusters in different availability zones.

Role Mapping

In Teleport, leaf clusters are autonomous - they have their own state, roles and even local users. Leaf clusters have autonomy to decide how to map identity of the external users to their local roles. We call this process role mapping. Take a look at the flow below to understand how it works:

Role mapping and cluster-level labels

You should note that you can use a certificate issued for a root cluster to connect directly to a leaf cluster because the leaf cluster inherently trusts the root cluster. In most cases, the trust relationship between the root and leaf clusters provides the desired behavior.

However, this trust relationship can also be exploited if you use cluster labels to enforce authorization restrictions. Because the leaf cluster trusts the certificate authority of the root cluster, that certificate can be used to bypass any leaf-specific cluster_labels settings that might be intended to restrict access to the leaf cluster. For example, assume you assign the leaf cluster a label using the following command:

tctl update rc/leaf --set-labels=env=prod

This label can't prevent direct access to the leaf cluster if a user has a certificate signed by the root cluster. You should use role mapping as the primary way to restrict access to leaf clusters and use cluster_labels for filtering and limiting the visibility of leaf cluster resources.

Next steps

Read the rest of the Architecture Guides:

• See how Teleport uses Certificates for authentication.
• Reduce your surface of attack using TLS routing.
• Follow our guide to set up trusted clusters.