You wouldn’t just let anyone enter your house without your permission, right? In addition, you put as many locks as possible to avoid any intrusion. The same applies to restricting illegitimate access to your infrastructure and computing environment. With the increasing number of cybercrime instances, organizations can never be too cautious against security risks.
As per a Cybersecurity Ventures report, cyberattacks will cost $10.5 trillion in global annual costs by 2025. Organizations can only minimize these threats by building a resilient protective layer. Improving security begins with tightening access controls to keep data breaches at bay. Traditionally, companies relied on passwords, secret keys, and role-based access controls to restrict unauthorized access to infrastructure. Managing them all is not only cumbersome but also resource-intensive.
With hackers getting creative, organizations must adopt a holistic approach using a solution like Teleport to manage end-to-end access control and monitoring processes. Teleport implements zero trust access management as an open infrastructure access platform, eliminating the dependency on static credentials.
In this article, we will delve deep into the role of Teleport in managing access controls for open infrastructure across virtual machines, applications, servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases.
What is Teleport?
Teleport is a modern security solution that acts as a gateway for your infrastructure managing identity-native access. It allows authorized users to access the resources securely online and remotely. Its efficiency is based on advanced PAM (Privileged Access Management) capabilities, including zero standing privileges and just-in-time (JIT) access.
Built by DevOps teams who understand common security challenges, Teleport can become a certification authority providing authorized access to critical infrastructure areas. It minimizes the threat of cyber attacks by
- Eliminating the use of secrets to access infrastructure, which is one of the top causes of data breach
- Simplifying access control management through activity logging, device attestation, and authorization practices like MFA (Multi-Factor Authorization) and RBAC.
Benefits of using Teleport to access infrastructure securely
Teleport allows you to centralize your operations to easily manage multiple servers, assigning both RBAC and ABAC (Attributes-based Access Control). Some of its benefits are listed below:
Secretless access management
Teleport provides access through methods like biometrics for humans, machine identities for service accounts and microservices, and ephemeral certificates for all resources. These measures ensure that your infrastructure is invincible to phishing attacks.
Manage privileges from one place
Consolidate all your access management activities in one centralized place so that you can control who you assign privileges. You can also revoke access to critical infrastructure resources while gaining granular access control.
Implement zero-trust security
Harden your infrastructure security through a zero-trust approach to enforce authentication and encryption natively by removing network-based security restrictions.
Intuitive UI & ease-of-use
Teleport is a single-command installation designed to create a hassle-free security management experience. It is highly interoperable with platforms like Kubernetes, Ansible, and AWS.
Teleport’s approach to open infrastructure
Let’s understand how Teleport secures access to open infrastructure like Kubernetes clusters through an identity-based access proxy:
First, you will receive temporary kubeconfig files using SSO (Single Sign-On), facilitating access to Kubernetes clusters without logging in again.
Next, as an admin, you can implement policies for different roles. This will allow you to enforce best practices.
Once the roles and privileges are assigned, you will add the Teleport Auth Service and Teleport Proxy Service within the clusters.
You can capture kubectl events and sessions to ensure adequate security and compliance.
To better understand this, we will briefly discuss the architecture of Teleport.
- Teleport Proxy: Teleport creates a proxy of the target resource, which will receive all access requests to ensure adequate protection of infrastructure resources.
- Teleport Authentication Service: When the proxy accepts a request, the legitimacy of the user, device, and other details are validated by the Authentication Service, which employs methods like certificate-based authentication and OAuth2.
- Teleport Node: Post authentication, the node installed on the target resource gets authentication and authorization details from the proxy resource before allowing access to the resource.
- Teleport GUI: You can manage these operations and access resources from a web dashboard. You can also use the GUI to assign roles to users and track their activity.
Teleport is the preferred way to manage secure access to infrastructure because of the following advantages:
- Teleport allows for easy scalability, simpler processes, and cost-effective security implementation by eliminating the need for credentials with identity-based access control.
- Teleport is an open-source solution that complies with popular industry standards like X.509 certificates, HTTPS, SAML, and OpenID Connect.
- The platform allows you to capture every user activity so that users have comprehensive visibility and greater control over user requests to ensure legitimate connections.
- Teleport allows you to accommodate your growth aspirations without affecting infrastructure security, as it proactively denies access to unauthorized requests.
Change access strategy in changing cyber risk scenario
As we head into a technologically advanced business landscape, hackers are likelier to adopt sophisticated methods for intruding into infrastructure and exploiting sensitive data. Organizations will have to think out of the box in securing their environments. They will have to give up on potentially vulnerable aspects like credentials, passwords, and keys. Teleport has emerged as a security platform that has introduced a transformative approach to identity-based access. This blog discussed Teleport, its capabilities, and its unique approach to securing open infrastructure.
