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:
| Teleport User | Allowed OS Logins | Description |
|---|---|---|
| joe | joe, root | Teleport user 'joe' can login into member nodes as OS user 'joe' or 'root' |
| juliet | juliet | Teleport user 'juliet' can login into member nodes only as OS user 'juliet' |
| ross | If no OS login is specified, it defaults to the same name as the Teleport user, here this is "ross". |
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
sandradoes not have access tograv-02through Teleport becausesandrais not an OS username. - Teleport User
joehas access to all nodes because the OS userrootis present on all nodes.
| Teleport User | logins | has access to nodes |
|---|---|---|
| joe | root, joe | grav-00, grav-01, grav-02 |
| tara | tara | grav-01, grav-02 |
| teleport | teleport | grav-00, grav-02 |
| sandra | ops | grav-00, grav-01 |
Teleport supports second factor authentication (2FA) when using a local auth connector and it is enforced by default.
2FA Support
2FA is not supported with SSO providers such as Github or OKTA. To learn more about SSO configuration check out the SSO section of the Enterprise Guide
There are two types of 2FA supported:
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.
Version Warning
External user storage is only supported in Teleport Enterprise. Please take a look at the Teleport Enterprise chapter for more information.
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.