Download PDF: https://goteleport.com/resources/books/indentity-native-infrastructure-access-management/

Traditional secret-based credentials can't scale to meet the complexity and size of cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Today's applications are spread across a diverse range of clouds and colocation facilities, as well as on-prem data centers. Each layer of this modern stack has its own attack vectors and protocols to consider.

How can you secure access to diverse infrastructure components, from bare metal to ephemeral containers, consistently and simply? In this practical book, authors Ev Kontsevoy, Sakshyam Shah, and Peter Conrad break this topic down into manageable pieces. You'll discover how different parts of the approach fit together in a way that enables engineering teams to build more secure applications without slowing down productivity.

https://goteleport.com/blog/ssh-bastion-host/

What is an SSH bastion and how is this different from an SSH jump server or an SSH proxy? In this post, we’ll answer this question and will show you how to set it up using two popular open source projects.

OpenSSH is the older and better known SSH server. It comes pre-installed by default with the vast majority of Linux distributions and is the easier option to get started with.

https://goteleport.com/blog/how-to-ssh-properly/

There's no denying that SSH is the de facto tool for *nix server administration. It's far from perfect, but it was designed with security in mind, and there's been a huge amount of tooling written over the years to make it easier to use. In addition, many popular products and just about every server deployment system integrate with SSH somehow. It is universally supported across pretty much all architectures and distributions, from Raspberry Pi's all the way up to massive supercomputer clusters.

https://goteleport.com/blog/troubleshooting-kubernetes-networking/

https://goteleport.com/blog/hack-via-pull-request/

https://goteleport.com/blog/how-saml-authentication-works/

At its core, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 is a means to exchange authorization and authentication information between services. SAML is frequently used to implement internal corporate single sign-on (SSO) solutions where the user logs into a service that acts as the single source of identity which then grants access to a subset of other internal services.

The advantage of adopting SAML/SSO from a security perspective are clear:

https://goteleport.com/blog/ssh-jump-server/

An SSH jump server is a regular Linux server, accessible from the Internet, which is used as a gateway to access other Linux machines on a private network using the SSH protocol. Sometimes an SSH jump server is also called a “jump host” or a “bastion host”. The purpose of an SSH jump server is to be the only gateway for access to your infrastructure reducing the size of any potential attack surface. Having a dedicated SSH access point also makes it easier to have an aggregated audit log of all SSH connections.

Why not call it an SSH proxy? Partly due to historical reasons. In the earlier days of SSH, users had to SSH into a jump host and from there, they had to type ssh again to “jump” to a destination host. Today, this is done automatically using the ProxyJump option.

Did you know that in the United States, the Social Security Number was never intended to become the defacto method for physical identification? On its surface, this may come as a shock given how ubiquitously SSNs are used for this exact reason, but looking beneath the surface, we find that SSNs are terrible forms of identification. Ignoring the security concerns of a nine digit numeric code, an SSN is not for universal identification. Rather, it represents an impersonal abstraction of a person that is intended for a narrow use-case. However, the convenience of a universally accepted method of identification was too great to pass up, and we now find ourselves stuck in a troublesome place: How do we let institutions authenticate our identities without relying on a unique identifier that can be easily compromised? While we do not yet have a universally secure authentication method for our physical identities, we have come to solve this problem in the digital world.

In this article, we will explore this same conundrum for our online identities in the form of the authentication layer, OIDC, built on the authorization protocol, OAuth. After a brief introduction to the topic of authentication and authorization, we will compare two common authentication methods (OIDC and SAML), discuss how OIDC works in relation to OAuth, and run through a brief case study.

https://goteleport.com/blog/comparing-ssh-keys/

https://goteleport.com/blog/do-we-still-need-a-bastion/