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Teleport Access Requests with Email

This guide will explain how to set up Teleport to send Just-in-Time Access Request notifications to users via email. Since all organizations use email for at least some of their communications, Teleport's email plugin makes it straightforward to integrate Access Requests into your existing workflows, letting you implement security best practices without compromising productivity.

The email Access Request plugin

Prerequisites​

Recommended: Configure Machine ID to provide short-lived Teleport credentials to the plugin. Before following this guide, follow a Machine ID deployment guide to run the tbot binary on your infrastructure.

  • Access to an SMTP service. The Teleport email plugin supports either Mailgun or a generic SMTP service that authenticates via username and password.
  • Either a Linux host or Kubernetes cluster where you will run the email plugin.
Protecting your email account

The Teleport plugin needs to use a username and password to authenticate to your SMTP service. To mitigate the risk of these credentials being leaked, you should set up a dedicated email account for the Teleport plugin and rotate the password regularly.

  • To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login, then verify that you can run tctl commands using your current credentials. tctl is supported on macOS and Linux machines. For example: 
    $ tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=email@example.com
    $ tctl status
    # Cluster  teleport.example.com
    # Version  15.4.22
    # CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
    If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequent tctl commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.

Step 1/7. Define RBAC resources​

Before you set up the email plugin, enable Role Access Requests in your Teleport cluster.

For the purpose of this guide, we will define an editor-requester role, which can request the built-in editor role, and an editor-reviewer role that can review requests for the editor role.

Create a file called editor-request-rbac.yaml with the following content:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: editor-reviewer
spec:
  allow:
    review_requests:
      roles: ['editor']
---
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: editor-requester
spec:
  allow:
    request:
      roles: ['editor']
      thresholds:
        - approve: 1
          deny: 1

Create the roles you defined:

$ tctl create -f editor-request-rbac.yaml
role 'editor-reviewer' has been created
role 'editor-requester' has been created

Allow yourself to review requests by users with the editor-requester role by assigning yourself the editor-reviewer role.

Assign the editor-reviewer role to your Teleport user by running the appropriate commands for your authentication provider:

  1. Retrieve your local user's roles as a comma-separated list:

    $ ROLES=$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.roles | join(",")')

  2. Edit your local user to add the new role:

    $ tctl users update $(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') \
      --set-roles "${ROLES?},editor-reviewer"

  3. Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

Create a user called myuser who has the editor-requester role. This user cannot edit your cluster configuration unless they request the editor role:

$ tctl users add myuser --roles=editor-requester

tctl will print an invitation URL to your terminal. Visit the URL and log in as myuser for the first time, registering credentials as configured for your Teleport cluster.

Later in this guide, you will have myuser request the editor role so you can review the request using the Teleport plugin.

Step 2/7. Install the Teleport email plugin​

Using a local SMTP server?

If you are using a local SMTP server to test the plugin, you should install the plugin on your local machine to ensure the plugin can connect to the SMTP server and perform any necessary DNS lookups to send email.

Your Teleport cluster does not need to perform DNS lookups for your plugin because the plugin dials out to the Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Auth Service.

We currently only provide linux-amd64 binaries. You can also compile these plugins from source. You can run the plugin from a remote host or your local development machine.

$ curl -L -O https://get.gravitational.com/teleport-access-email-v15.4.22-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf teleport-access-email-v15.4.22-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
$ cd teleport-access-email
$ sudo ./install

Make sure the binary is installed:

$ teleport-email version
teleport-email v15.4.22 git:teleport-email-v15.4.22-fffffffff go1.21

Step 3/7. Create a user and role for the plugin​

Teleport's Access Request plugins authenticate to your Teleport cluster as a user with permissions to list and read Access Requests. This way, plugins can retrieve Access Requests from the Teleport Auth Service and present them to reviewers.

Define a user and role called access-plugin by adding the following content to a file called access-plugin.yaml:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-plugin
spec:
  allow:
    rules:
      - resources: ['access_request']
        verbs: ['list', 'read']
      - resources: ['access_plugin_data']
        verbs: ['update']
---
kind: user
metadata:
  name: access-plugin
spec:
  roles: ['access-plugin']
version: v2

Create the user and role:

$ tctl create -f access-plugin.yaml

As with all Teleport users, the Teleport Auth Service authenticates the access-plugin user by issuing short-lived TLS credentials. In this case, we will need to request the credentials manually by impersonating the access-plugin role and user.

If you are running a self-hosted Teleport Enterprise deployment and are using tctl from the Auth Service host, you will already have impersonation privileges.

To grant your user impersonation privileges for access-plugin, define a role called access-plugin-impersonator by pasting the following YAML document into a file called access-plugin-impersonator.yaml:

kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: access-plugin-impersonator
spec:
  allow:
    impersonate:
      roles:
      - access-plugin
      users:
      - access-plugin

Create the access-plugin-impersonator role:

$ tctl create -f access-plugin-impersonator.yaml

If you are providing identity files to the plugin with Machine ID, assign the access-plugin role to the Machine ID bot user. Otherwise, assign this role to the user you plan to use to generate credentials for the access-plugin role and user:

Assign the access-plugin-impersonator role to your Teleport user by running the appropriate commands for your authentication provider:

  1. Retrieve your local user's roles as a comma-separated list:

    $ ROLES=$(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.roles | join(",")')

  2. Edit your local user to add the new role:

    $ tctl users update $(tsh status -f json | jq -r '.active.username') \
      --set-roles "${ROLES?},access-plugin-impersonator"

  3. Sign out of the Teleport cluster and sign in again to assume the new role.

You will now be able to generate signed certificates for the access-plugin role and user.

Step 4/7. Export the access plugin identity​

Give the plugin access to a Teleport identity file. We recommend using Machine ID for this in order to produce short-lived identity files that are less dangerous if exfiltrated, though in demo deployments, you can generate longer-lived identity files with tctl:

Configure tbot with an output that will produce the credentials needed by the plugin. As the plugin will be accessing the Teleport API, the correct output type to use is identity.

For this guide, the directory destination will be used. This will write these credentials to a specified directory on disk. Ensure that this directory can be written to by the Linux user that tbot runs as, and that it can be read by the Linux user that the plugin will run as.

Modify your tbot configuration to add an identity output.

If running tbot on a Linux server, use the directory output to write identity files to the /opt/machine-id directory:

outputs:
- type: identity
  destination:
    type: directory
    # For this guide, /opt/machine-id is used as the destination directory.
    # You may wish to customize this. Multiple outputs cannot share the same
    # destination.
    path: /opt/machine-id

If running tbot on Kubernetes, write the identity file to Kubernetes secret instead:

outputs:
  - type: identity
    destination:
      type: kubernetes_secret
      name: teleport-plugin-email-identity

If operating tbot as a background service, restart it. If running tbot in one-shot mode, execute it now.

You should now see an identity file under /opt/machine-id or a Kubernetes secret named teleport-plugin-email-identity. This contains the private key and signed certificates needed by the plugin to authenticate with the Teleport Auth Service.

Step 5/7. Configure the plugin​

At this point, you have generated credentials that the email plugin will use to connect to Teleport. You will now configure the plugin to use these credentials to receive Access Request notifications from Teleport and email them to your chosen recipients.

Create a config file​

The Teleport email plugin uses a configuration file in TOML format. Generate a boilerplate configuration by running the following command:

$ teleport-email configure | sudo tee /etc/teleport-email.toml

Edit the configuration file​

Edit the configuration file for your environment. We will show you how to set each value below.

[teleport]​

addr: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service or Teleport Enterprise Cloud account (e.g., teleport.example.com:443 or mytenant.teleport.sh:443).

identity: Fill this in with the path to the identity file you exported earlier.

client_key, client_crt, root_cas: Comment these out, since we are not using them in this configuration.

If you are providing credentials to the plugin using a tbot binary that runs on a Linux server, make sure the value of identity is the same as the path of the identity file you configured tbot to generate, /opt/machine-id/identity.

Configure the plugin to periodically reload the identity file, ensuring that it does not attempt to connect to the Teleport Auth Service with expired credentials.

Add the following to the teleport section of the configuration:

refresh_identity = true

[mailgun] or [smtp]​

Provide the credentials for your SMTP service depending on whether you are using Mailgun or SMTP service.

If you are deploying the email plugin on a Linux host:

  1. In the mailgun section, assign domain to the domain name and subdomain of your Mailgun account.
  2. Assign mailgun.private_key to your Mailgun private key.

If you are deploying the email plugin on Kubernetes:

  1. Write your Mailgun private key to a local file called mailgun-private-key.
  2. Create a Kubernetes secret from the file:
$ kubectl -n teleport create secret generic mailgun-private-key --from-file=mailgun-private-key
  1. Assign mailgun.privateKeyFromSecret to mailgun-private-key.

[delivery]​

Assign sender to the email address from which you would like the Teleport plugin to send messages.

[role_to_recipients]​

The role_to_recipients map (roleToRecipients for Helm users) configures the recipients that the email plugin will notify when a user requests access to a specific role. When the plugin receives an Access Request from the Auth Service, it will look up the role being requested and identify the recipients to notify.

Here is an example of a role_to_recipients map. Each value can be a single string or an array of strings:

[role_to_recipients]
"*" = ["security@example.com", "executive-team@example.com"]
"dev" = "eng@example.com"
"dba" = "mallory@example.com"

In the role_to_recipients map, each key is the name of a Teleport role. Each value configures the recipients the plugin will email when it receives an Access Request for that role. Each string must be an email address.

The role_to_recipients map must also include an entry for "*", which the plugin looks up if no other entry matches a given role name. In the example above, requests for roles aside from dev and dba will notify security@example.com and executive-team@example.com.

Suggested reviewers

Users can suggest reviewers when they create an Access Request, e.g.,:

$ tsh request create --roles=dbadmin --reviewers=alice@example.com,ivan@example.com

If an Access Request includes suggested reviewers, the email plugin will add these to the list of recipients to notify. If a suggested reviewer is an email address, the plugin will send a message to that recipient in addition to those configured in role_to_recipients.

Configure the email plugin to notify you when a user requests the editor role by adding the following to your role_to_recipients config, replacing YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS with the appropriate address:

[role_to_recipients]
"*" = "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS"
"editor" = "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS"
Configuring recipients without role mapping

If you do not plan to use role-to-recipient mapping, you can configure the Teleport email plugin to notify a static list of recipients for every Access Request event by using the delivery.recipients field:

[delivery]
recipients = ["eng@exmaple.com", "dev@example.com"]

If you use delivery.recipients, you must remove the role_to_recipients configuration section. Behind the scenes, delivery.recipients assigns the recipient list to a role_to_recipients mapping under the wildcard value "*".

You configuration should resemble the following:

# /etc/teleport-email.toml
[teleport]
addr = "example.com:443"
identity = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/email/identity"
refresh_identity = true

[mailgun]
domain = "sandbox123abc.mailgun.org" 
private_key = "xoxb-fakekey62b0eac53565a38c8cc0316f6"                                     

# As an alternative, you can use SMTP server credentials:
#
# [smtp]
# host = "smtp.gmail.com"
# port = 587
# username = "username@gmail.com"
# password = ""
# password_file = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/email/smtp_password"

[delivery]
sender = "noreply@example.com" 

[role_to_recipients]
"*" = "eng@example.com"
"editor" = ["admin@example.com", "execs@example.com"]

[log]
output = "stderr" # Logger output. Could be "stdout", "stderr" or "/var/lib/teleport/email.log"
severity = "INFO" # Logger severity. Could be "INFO", "ERROR", "DEBUG" or "WARN".

Step 6/7. Test the email plugin​

After finishing your configuration, you can now run the plugin and test your email-based Access Request flow:

$ teleport-email start

If everything works as expected, the log output should look like this:

$ teleport-email start
INFO   Starting Teleport Access Email Plugin (): email/app.go:80
INFO   Plugin is ready email/app.go:101

Create an Access Request​

A Teleport admin can create an Access Request for another user with tctl:

$ tctl request create myuser --roles=editor

The recipients you configured earlier should receive notifications of the request by email.

Resolve the request​

Once you receive an Access Request message, click the link to visit Teleport and approve or deny the request:

Reviewing a request

Reviewing from the command line

You can also review an Access Request from the command line:

# Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
$ tctl request approve REQUEST_ID
$ tctl request deny REQUEST_ID

Step 7/7. Set up systemd​

This section is only relevant if you are running the Teleport email plugin on a Linux host.

In production, we recommend starting the Teleport plugin daemon via an init system like systemd. Here's the recommended Teleport plugin service unit file for systemd:

(!/examples/systemd/plugins/teleport-email.service!)

Save this as teleport-email.service in either /usr/lib/systemd/system/ or another unit file load path supported by systemd.

Enable and start the plugin:

$ sudo systemctl enable teleport-email
$ sudo systemctl start teleport-email