Creating Access Lists with IaC

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Access Lists allow Teleport users to be granted long-term access to resources managed within Teleport. With Access Lists, administrators can regularly audit and control membership to specific roles and traits, which then tie easily back into Teleport's existing RBAC system.

In this guide, we'll follow up on the IaC users and roles guide by allowing users with the manager role to grant the support-engineer role to users meeting specific criteria.

How it works

Access Lists are registered with the Teleport Auth Service as resources stored on the Auth Service backend. The Teleport Auth Service exposes a gRPC API that enables clients to create, delete, or modify backend resources, including Access Lists. The Teleport Kubernetes Operator and Terraform provider, along with the tctl command-line tool, can manage agentless SSH services by authenticating to the Teleport Auth Service and interacting with its gRPC API.

Access Lists can be managed via IaC but Access List memberships cannot. The goal of Access Lists is to decentralize granting and reviewing access. By allowing managers to grant access within specific guidelines and automatically enforcing review, users can request common access rights without having to go through the centralized team managing the Teleport IaC. This reduces the load on the centralized IaC/security team, ensures the access reviewer is aware of the context, reduces the request resolution time, and ensures access grants are periodically reviewed.

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you must follow first the basic users and roles IaC guide. We will reuse its users and roles for our Access List.

Step 1/3 - Write manifests

Write the privileged role manifest

We will create a new role support-engineer that grants access to production servers. The engineer role from the previous guide was only granting access to dev and staging servers.

tctl

Create the following privileged-role.yaml file:

kind: role
version: v7
metadata:
  name: support-engineer
spec:
  allow:
    logins: ['root', 'ubuntu', '{{internal.logins}}']
    node_labels:
      'env': ['production']

Kubernetes Operator

Create the following privileged-role.yaml file:

apiVersion: resources.teleport.dev/v1
kind: TeleportRoleV7
metadata:
  name: support-engineer
spec:
  allow:
    logins: [ 'root', 'ubuntu', '{{internal.logins}}' ]
    node_labels:
      'env': [ 'production' ]

Terraform

Create the following privileged-role.tf file:

resource "teleport_role" "support-engineer" {
  version = "v7"
  metadata = {
    name = "support-engineer"
  }

  spec = {
    allow = {
      logins = ["root", "ubuntu", "{{internal.logins}}"]
      node_labels = {
        env = ["production"]
      }
    }
  }
}

Write the Access List manifest

In this step we'll create an Access List that allows users with the manager role such as alice to grant access to production to users with the engineer role.

tctl

Create the following accesslist.yaml file:

version: v1
kind: access_list
metadata:
  name: support-engineers
spec:
  title: "Production access for support engineers"
  audit:
    recurrence:
      frequency: 6months
  description: "Use this Access List to grant access to production to your engineers enrolled in the support rotation."
  owners:
    - description: "manager of NA support team"
      name: alice
  ownership_requires:
    roles:
      - manager
  grants:
    roles:
      - support-engineer
  membership_requires:
    roles:
      - engineer

Kubernetes Operator

Create the following accesslist.yaml file:

apiVersion: resources.teleport.dev/v1
kind: TeleportAccessList
metadata:
  name: support-engineers
spec:
  title: "Production access for support engineers"
  description: "Use this Access List to grant access to production to your engineers enrolled in the support rotation."
  audit:
    recurrence:
      frequency: 6months
  owners:
    - description: "manager of NA support team"
      name: alice
  ownership_requires:
    roles:
      - manager
  grants:
    roles:
      - support-engineer
  membership_requires:
    roles:
      - engineer

Terraform

Create the following accesslist.tf file:

resource "teleport_access_list" "support-engineers" {
  header =  {
    version = "v1"
    metadata = {
      name = "support-engineers"
    }
  }

  spec = {
    title = "Production access for support engineers"
    description = "Use this Access List to grant access to production to your engineers enrolled in the support rotation."
    audit = {
      recurrence = {
        frequency = 6
      }
    }
    owners = [
      {
        description = "manager of NA support team"
        name = "alice"
      }
    ]
    ownership_requires = {
      roles = ["manager"]
    }
    grants = {
      roles = ["support-engineer"]
    }
    membership_requires = {
      roles = ["engineer"]
    }
  }
}

Step 2/3 - Apply the manifests

tctl

tctl create -f privileged-role.yaml
role 'support-engineer' has been created
tctl create -f accesslist.yaml
Access list "support-engineers" has been created

note

The user resource depends on roles. You must create roles before users as a user with a non-existing role is invalid and will be rejected by Teleport.

Kubernetes Operator

Create the Kubernetes CRs with the following commands:

kubectl apply -n "$OPERATOR_NAMESPACE" -f privileged-role.yaml
teleportrolev7.resources.teleport.dev/support-engineer created
kubectl apply -n "$OPERATOR_NAMESPACE" -f accesslist.yaml
teleportaccesslist.resources.teleport.dev/support-engineers

Terraform

terraform plan
[...]Plan: 2 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.
terraform apply
teleport_access_list.support-engineers: Creating...teleport_role.support-engineer: Creating...teleport_role.support-engineer: Creation complete after 0s [id=support-engineer]teleport_access_list.support-engineers: Creation complete after 0s [id=support-engineers]

Step 3/3 - Log in as alice and grant access to bob

Now, you created an Access List allowing alice to grant the support-engineer role to its engineers.

You can log in as alice and add bob to the support-engineers Access List.

Web UI

Login as alice in the web UI, open the management panel and select the "Access Lists" tab. Your Access List should be displayed, open it, choose "Enroll members" and add bob.

CLI

Login as alice with tsh, then add bob to the Access List:

login as alice
tsh login --proxy <your-cluster-domain>:<port> --user alice

tctl acl users add <access-list-name> <user> [<expires>] [<reason>]
tctl acl users add support-engineers bob "" "Bob is now part of the on-call support rotation"

Finally, list the Access List members:

tctl acl users ls support-engineers
Members of support-engineers:- bob

Next steps

You can see all supported Access List fields in the Access List reference.