Configuring Workload Identity and GCP Workload Identity Federation with JWTs

Teleport Workload Identity issues flexible short-lived identities in JWT format. GCP Workload Identity Federation allows you to use these JWTs to authenticate to GCP services.

This can be useful in cases where a machine needs to securely authenticate with GCP services without the use of a long-lived credential. This is because the machine can authenticate with Teleport without using any shared secrets by using one of our delegated join methods.

In this guide, we'll configure Teleport Workload Identity and GCP to allow our workload to authenticate to the GCP Cloud Storage API and upload content to a bucket.

How it works

This implementation differs from using the Teleport Application Service to protect GCP APIs in a few ways:

• Requests to GCP are not proxied through the Teleport Proxy Service, meaning reduced latency but also less visibility, as these requests will not be recorded in Teleport's audit log.
• Workload Identity works with any GCP client, including the command-line tool but also their SDKs.
• Using the Teleport Application Service to access GCP does not work with Machine ID and therefore cannot be used when a machine needs to authenticate with AWS.

Prerequisites

• A running Teleport cluster version 17.0.0-dev or above. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.

• The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool.

  Visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh.

• 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. For example:

  tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=email@example.com
  tctl status
  Cluster  teleport.example.com
  Version  17.0.0-dev
  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.
• tbot must already be installed and configured on the host where the workloads which need to access Teleport Workload Identity will run. For more information, see the deployment guides.

Deciding on a SPIFFE ID structure

Within Teleport Workload Identity, all identities are represented using a SPIFFE ID. This is a URI that uniquely identifies the entity that the identity represents. The scheme is always spiffe://, and the host will be the name of your Teleport cluster. The structure of the path of this URI is up to you.

For the purposes of this guide, we will be granting access to GCP to the spiffe://example.teleport.sh/svc/example-service SPIFFE ID.

If you have already deployed Teleport Workload Identity, then you will already have a SPIFFE ID structure in place. If you have not, then you will need to decide on a structure for your SPIFFE IDs.

If you are only using Teleport Workload Identity with GCP Workload Identity Federation, you may structure your SPIFFE IDs so that they explicitly specify the GCP service account they are allowed to assume. However, it often makes more sense to name the workload or person that will use the SPIFFE ID. See the best practices guide for further advice.

Step 1/4. Configure GCP

Configuring GCP Workload Identity Federation for the first time involves a few steps. Some of these may not be necessary if you have previously configured GCP Workload Identity Federation for your Teleport cluster.

Create a Workload Identity Pool and OIDC Provider

First, you'll need to create a workload identity pool and an OIDC provider within this pool in GCP. A workload identity pool is an entity for managing how external workload identities are represented within GCP.

The provider configures how the external identities should authenticate to the pool. Since Teleport Workload Identity issues OIDC compatible JWT-SVIDs, you'll use the OIDC provider type.

When configuring the pool, you need to choose a name to identify it. This name should uniquely identify the source of the workload identities. It may make sense to name it after your Teleport cluster. In this example, it will be called workload-id-pool.

When configuring the provider, you need to specify the issuer URI. This will be the public address of your Teleport Proxy Service with the path /workload-identity appended. Your Teleport Proxy Service must be accessible by GCP in order for OIDC federation to work.

You'll also specify an "attribute mapping". This determines how GCP will map the identity within the JWT to a principal in GCP. Since we're using SVIDs, we'll map the sub claim within the JWT to the google.subject attribute to be able to use the workload's SPIFFE ID to make authorization decisions in GCP.

data "google_project" "project" {}

resource "google_iam_workload_identity_pool" "workload_identity" {
    workload_identity_pool_id = "workload-id-pool"
}

resource "google_iam_workload_identity_pool_provider" "workload_identity_oidc" {
    workload_identity_pool_id          = google_iam_workload_identity_pool.workload_identity.workload_identity_pool_id
    workload_identity_pool_provider_id = "workload-id-oidc"
    attribute_mapping                  = {
        // Maps the `sub` claim within the JWT to the `google.subject` attribute.
        // This will allow it to be used to make Authz decisions in GCP.
        "google.subject" = "assertion.sub"
    }
    oidc {
        // Replace example.teleport.sh with the hostname of your Proxy Service's
        // public address.
        issuer_uri        = "https://example.teleport.sh/workload-identity"
    }
}

Replace "workload-id-pool" with a meaningful, unique name.
gcloud iam workload-identity-pools create workload-id-pool \    --location="global"

Replace "workload-id-pool" with the name of the pool you just created and
"workload-id-oidc" with a meaningful, unique name.
gcloud iam workload-identity-pools providers create-oidc workload-id-oidc \    --location="global" \    # This should match the name of the pool you just created.
    --workload-identity-pool="workload-id-pool" \    # Replace example.teleport.sh with the hostname of your Proxy Service's    # public address.    --issuer-uri="https://example.teleport.sh/workload-identity" \    # Maps the `sub` claim within the JWT to the `google.subject` attribute.    # This will allow it to be used to make Authz decisions in GCP.    --attribute-mapping="google.subject=assertion.sub"

Create a storage bucket and RBAC

For the purposes of this guide, we'll be granting the workload access to a GCP storage bucket. You can substitute this step to grant access to a different service within GCP of your choice.

We'll be granting our workload identity direct access to the resource without the workload assuming a service account.

To do this, we use the principal that is generated by the workload identity federation pool based on the attribute mapping that we have already configured. This principal can be used directly in IAM policies to grant privileges to a workload identity. The principal contains the GCP project number, the name of the workload identity pool and the SPIFFE ID. It takes the following format:

principal://iam.googleapis.com/projects/$PROJECT_NUMBER/locations/global/workloadIdentityPools/$POOL_NAME/subject/$SPIFFE_ID

It is also possible to grant a workload the ability to assume a service account. This is not covered within this guide, but, can be useful in scenarios where you already have a service account created with the necessary privileges and now wish to allow the workload to use this without the use of a long-lived shared secret.

resource "google_storage_bucket" "demo" {
    // Replace with a meaningful, unique name.
    name          = "example"
    location      = "EU"
    force_destroy = true

    uniform_bucket_level_access = true
}

locals {
    // Replace with the SPIFFE ID of the workload that will access the bucket.
    allow_spiffe_id = "spiffe://example.teleport.sh/svc/example-service"
}

resource "google_storage_bucket_iam_binding" "binding" {
    bucket = google_storage_bucket.demo.name
    role = "roles/storage.admin"
    members = [
        "principal://iam.googleapis.com/projects/${data.google_project.project.number}/locations/global/workloadIdentityPools/${google_iam_workload_identity_pool.leaf_cluster.workload_identity_pool_id}/subject/${local.allow_spiffe_id}",
    ]
}

Replace "example" with a meaningful, unique name.
gcloud storage buckets create gs://example \    --location=EU \    --uniform-bucket-level-access

ROLE="roles/storage.admin"
Replace PROJECT_NUMBER with your GCP project number.
PROJECT_NUMBER="123456789000"
Replace POOL_ID with the ID of the Workload Identity Pool you created.
POOL_ID="workload-id-pool"
Replace SPIFFE_ID with the SPIFFE ID of the workload that will access the bucket.
SPIFFE_ID="spiffe://example.teleport.sh/svc/example-service"
MEMBER="principal://iam.googleapis.com/projects/${PROJECT_NUMBER}/locations/global/workloadIdentityPools/${POOL_ID}/subject/${SPIFFE_ID}"
gcloud storage buckets add-iam-policy-binding gs://example --member=$MEMBER --role=$ROLE

Step 2/4. Configure Teleport RBAC

Now we need to configure Teleport to allow a JWT to be issued containing the SPIFFE ID we have chosen.

Create role.yaml with the following content:

kind: role
version: v6
metadata:
  name: my-workload-gcp
spec:
  allow:
    spiffe:
      - path: /svc/example-service

Replace:

• my-workload-gcp with a descriptive name for the role.
• /svc/example-service with the path part of the SPIFFE ID you have chosen.

Apply this role to your Teleport cluster using tctl:

tctl create -f role.yaml

You now need to assign this role to the bot:

tctl bots update my-bot --add-roles my-workload-gcp

Step 3/4. Issue Workload Identity JWTs

You'll now configure tbot to issue and renew the short-lived JWT SVIDs for your workload. It'll write the JWT as a file on disk, where you can then configure GCP clients and SDKs to read it.

Before configuring this, you'll need to determine the correct audience to request in the JWT SVIDs. This is specific to the Workload Identity Federation configuration you have just created and contains three components:

• The project number of your GCP project
• The name of your Workload Identity Federation pool as configured in GCP
• The name of your Workload Identity Federation provider as configured in GCP

It has the following format: https://iam.googleapis.com/projects/$PROJECT_NUMBER/locations/global/workloadIdentityPools/$POOL_NAME/providers/$PROVIDER_NAME.

Take your already deployed tbot service and configure it to issue SPIFFE SVIDs by adding the following to the tbot configuration file:

outputs:
  - type: spiffe-svid
    destination:
      type: directory
      path: /opt/workload-identity
    svid:
      path: /svc/example-service
    jwts:
      - audience: https://iam.googleapis.com/projects/123456789000/locations/global/workloadIdentityPools/workload-id-pool/providers/workload-id-oidc
        file_name: gcp-jwt

Replace:

• 123456789000 with your GCP project number.
• workload-id-pool with the name of your Workload Identity Federation pool.
• workload-id-oidc with the name of your Workload Identity Federation provider.

Restart your tbot service to apply the new configuration. You should see a file created at /opt/workload-identity/gcp-jwt containing the JWT.

Step 4/4. Configure GCP CLIs and SDKs

Finally, you need to create a configuration file to configure the GCP CLIs and SDKs to authenticate using Workload Identity. This configuration file will specify the path to the JWT file that tbot is writing and will specify which Workload Identity Federation pool and provider to use.

You can generate this configuration file using the gcloud CLI:

gcloud iam workload-identity-pools create-cred-config \    projects/123456789000/locations/global/workloadIdentityPools/workload-id-pool/providers/workload-id-oidc \    --output-file=gcp-workload-identity.json \    --credential-source-file=/opt/workload-identity/gcp-jwt \    --credential-source-type=text

Replace:

• 123456789000 with your GCP project number.
• workload-id-pool with the name of your Workload Identity Federation pool.
• workload-id-oidc with the name of your Workload Identity Federation provider.
• /opt/workload-identity/gcp-jwt with the path to the JWT file that tbot is writing.

The command should have created a file called gcp-workload-identity.json in the current directory.

gcloud CLI

To configure the gcloud CLI to authenticate using Workload Identity, you use the gcloud auth login command and specify the path to the configuration file that you have just created:

gcloud auth login --cred-file gcp-workload-identity.json

You can now test authenticating to the GCP Storage API. Create a file which you can upload to your bucket:

echo "Hello, World!" > hello.txt

Now, use the gcloud CLI to upload this file to your bucket:

gcloud storage cp hello.txt gs://example

If everything is configured correctly, you should see this file uploaded to your bucket. Inspecting the audit logs on GCP should indicate that the request was authenticated using Workload Identity and specify the SPIFFE ID of the workload that made the request.

GCP SDKs

To configure the GCP SDKs to authenticate using Workload Identity, you need to set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to the path of the configuration file that you have just created:

export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=gcp-workload-identity.json

Next steps

• GCP Workload Identity Federation documentation: The official GCP documentation for Workload Identity Federation.
• Workload Identity Overview: Overview of Teleport Workload Identity.
• JWT SVID Overview: Overview of the JWT SVIDs issued by Teleport Workload Identity.
• Best Practices: Best practices for using Workload Identity in Production.
• Read the configuration reference to explore all the available configuration options.