Often referred to as AuthN (authentication) and AuthZ (authorization) in the modern access control paradigm, both authentication and authorization are a method to control access to resources. These resources can be files, programs, web applications, mobile applications, operating systems, network devices, etc. Let’s explore three common scenarios on how authentication and authorization are involved. These are the few sample cases of authentication vs. authorization.

Our Solution Engineering (SE) team is full of individuals who have vast real-world experience building and maintaining complex IT access systems with sophisticated audit layers through their work as DevOps engineers. The problems that we have all faced before joining Teleport are the exact problems that our customers face. So when it comes to our demos, we like to show real-world scenarios aligned to customer usage patterns, in environments similar to our customers.

At Teleport, we advocate SSH certificates over SSH keys and passwords as the best authentication method for SSH. Nothing beats the security and operational flexibility of using certificate-based authentication for a large fleet of SSH servers running on dynamic infrastructure. But in practice, certificate-based authentication is far from the de facto authentication method, and sometimes we may need to use SSH keys.

This article will explore methods for “hiding” SSH servers so that the server is harder to discover by malicious users on public networks. We’ll focus on changing the default SSH port and implementing SSH port knocking to make it more difficult for unwanted users to discover or locate the server.

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a go-to solution to prevent privilege misuse and insider threats, and limit malware propagation. After all, properly protecting and monitoring the keys to the kingdom is always a good practice. Privileged Access Management has been even more critical in recent times. With the advent of the cloud where infrastructure is provisioned with a single API call and authenticated with a single API key, the risk of someone misusing these credentials is far higher.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a keystone to accessing AWS accounts, but as companies grow, it can be difficult to understand and standardize, especially across many AWS accounts. To put some personality into the challenges of managing identity for multiple AWS resources and accounts, I’ll start with a short story about a fictional company that you might recognize as similar to the one you work in today! ACME Net is growing fast.

The SSH agent (ssh-agent) is an SSH key manager that stores the SSH key in a process memory so that users can log into SSH servers without having to type the key’s passphrase every time they authenticate with the server. In addition to the key management feature, SSH agent supports agent forwarding, which helps to authenticate with servers that sit behind a bastion or jump server.

Z3 is a satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver developed by Microsoft Research. With a description like that, you’d expect it to be restricted to esoteric corners of the computerized mathematics world, but it has made impressive inroads addressing conventional software engineering needs: analyzing network ACLs and firewalls in Microsoft Azure, for example.

Lack of access accountability and unmonitored access create a considerable security risk for organizations, and the best way to mitigate this challenge is by implementing identity-based access.

SSH servers are a common target for brute-force attacks. This is even more true if your infrastructure sits behind an SSH bastion because attackers have no choice but to compromise the bastion host either by exploitation or denial of service. In this article, we will list a few controls which will help you harden your SSH servers from brute- force attacks.