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Teleport’s Access Management compared with AWS IAM Role

January 14, 2025 by walter

Teleport's Access Management mechanism provides a secure and unified way to manage access to infrastructure resources, combining identity-based authentication, roles, and automation tools. Here's how it compares to AWS IAM concepts and works:

1. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

• AWS IAM:

  • Uses IAM roles to define a set of permissions for what an identity (user, group, or service) can do.
  • Roles are associated with policies (JSON files) that specify permissions.

• Teleport:

  • Uses Teleport roles to define what actions users or machines can perform and which resources they can access within the Teleport cluster.
  • Roles control permissions like access to servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, and applications, with rules for session recording and command restrictions.

Key Difference:

• Teleport roles often encapsulate access to multiple types of infrastructure (e.g., SSH, Kubernetes, database) in one role.
• AWS IAM roles are resource-type specific (e.g., S3 bucket access vs. EC2 instance access).

2. Bots (Machine Accounts)

• AWS IAM:

  • Uses IAM roles or IAM users with access keys to allow applications or services to perform operations.
  • Access keys can be long-lived or temporary (via roles and AssumeRole API).

• Teleport:

  • Introduces bots as automated machine identities for applications, CI/CD pipelines, or scripts.
  • Bots act as clients in the Teleport cluster, authenticating themselves using certificates instead of static credentials.
  • Certificates are short-lived and periodically renewed, improving security compared to long-lived IAM access keys.

Key Difference:

• Teleport's bots avoid long-lived credentials by leveraging short-lived certificates, reducing the risk of key leakage.

3. Join Tokens

• AWS IAM:

  • AWS provides mechanisms like STS tokens or AWS SSO for short-lived session-based authentication. These tokens are associated with predefined roles and permissions.
  • IAM access keys are the closest analogy to tokens but are usually managed manually.

• Teleport:

  • Uses join tokens for secure onboarding of new resources into the cluster, such as servers or applications.
  • Tokens can be one-time-use or time-limited, and they are often combined with predefined roles or labels to ensure the new resource inherits the correct permissions.

Key Difference:

• AWS IAM access methods primarily focus on enabling service interaction, while Teleport's join tokens are used to securely bootstrap and register infrastructure into a central access management system.

4. Unified Access Control

• AWS IAM:

  • Manages access to AWS resources only (e.g., S3, EC2, RDS). Extending IAM to non-AWS resources requires additional tools.

• Teleport:

  • Manages access to on-premises, cloud-native, and third-party resources (e.g., databases, SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters) in a unified way.
  • Provides audit logging, session recording, and real-time monitoring of user activity.

Key Difference:

• AWS IAM is tightly coupled with AWS services, while Teleport provides a vendor-neutral, unified layer for infrastructure access.

Summary Table

In Summary:
Teleport simplifies and strengthens access management by replacing long-lived credentials with short-lived certificates, unifying access across diverse infrastructure, and providing robust auditing and monitoring. AWS IAM, while powerful for AWS services, requires complementary tools for similar functionality in heterogeneous environments.

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