Web Access Bastion

Akeyless Web Access Bastion provides Secure Remote Access to any web application with session recording, including proxy service acting as an entry point to your internal web applications, where only after successful authentication users will get access, either via an isolated remote browser or directly to your target server based on your secret configuration.

Working with isolated browsers provides a complete zero-knowledge where users do not have any knowledge about the access credentials.

This chart bootstraps the Akeyless-Web-Access-Bastion deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

Prerequisites

  • Helm Installed

  • K8s Installed

  • Minimum 1 vCPU available with 2GB RAM for the WebWorker and 1 vCPU available with 1GB RAM for the WebDispatcher This can be explicitly specified inside the chart for the webWorker and for the dispatcher services.

**Network**

When using an Embedded browser session behind a load balancer such as ELB, the session can be closed due to an idle connection timeout, it's advised to increase it to a reasonably high value or even unlimited.

e.g, when running on AWS with ELB: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/config-idle-timeout.html?icmpid=docs_elb_console

**Storage**

To be able to download files to your local machine, the chart requires a storage class with ReadWriteMany access mode.

Since a storage class is more environment specific, you will need to provide one before proceeding. In addition, please provide a PersistentVolumes with reference under the persistence section in the values.yaml file.

persistence: 
  shareStorageVolume:
    name: share-storage
    storageClassName: "efs-sc"
    accessModes:
      - ReadWriteMany
    persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
    annotations: {}
    mountOptions:
      - dir_mode=0650
      - file_mode=0650
    size: 2Gi

e.g, when running on AWS with EKS: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/efs-csi.html

For security reasons, please limit the PersistentVolumesmount permissions to0650`.

**Horizontal Auto-Scaling**

Horizontal auto-scaling is based on the HorizontalPodAutoscaler object.
For it to work correctly, the Kubernetes metrics server must be installed in the cluster - https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server.

🚧

Warning

To enable Secure Remote Access features you will have to get an access-key to Akeyless private repository. Please contact your Account Manager for more details.

Installing the Chart

Add Akeyless helm charts repository to your Helm repository list:

helm repo add akeyless https://akeylesslabs.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

The values.yaml file holds default values. Copy the file from:

https://github.com/akeylesslabs/helm-charts/tree/main/charts/akeyless-zero-trust-web-access

Or run the following helm command to generate the values file locally:

helm show values akeyless/akeyless-zero-trust-web-access > values.yaml

Configuration

To connect to Akeyless private repository, set the dockerRepositoryCreds field to access the Akeyless internal image and the relevant apiGatewayURL to point your Gateway REST API port 8080

dockerRepositoryCreds:
apiGatewayURL: https://rest.akeyless.io

# Optional, to Work with a specifc enviorement set the relevant URL.
  env:
     - name: AKEYLESS_URL
       value: "https://vault.akeyless.io"

To enable HTTP Proxy mode for remote access, add the following environment variable to the env section under the dispatcher configuration:

env:
    - name: WEB_PROXY_TYPE
      value: http

🚧

Warning

The HTTP-type proxy will only work with Chrome browsers currently. For Firefox, you can skip this environment variable configuration so the default socks-proxy protocol will be used.

The Web Access Bastion should be set with a privileged AccessID with Read and list permissions, to fetch the relevant secret on behalf of your users, set the privilegedAccessfield with the relevant AccessID as described in the Authentication section of this page.

Users then can have only list permissions on their secrets. Upon successful authentication against your IDP, the bastion will fetch the requested secret from Akeyless and will inject them directly for your users transparently.

To control who will be the relevant users that will be allowed to request access from the Akeyless Bastion, set the allowedAccessIDs field with a list of AccessIDs that will be authorized to request access.

privilegedAccess:
  accessID: ""
  allowedAccessIDs: []

Authentication

The following Authentication Methods are supported:

API Key Authentication

To set your Bastion default authentication based on API Key, set the accessID and the matching accessKey with a list of allowedAccessIDs that will be authorized to request access:

privilegedAccess:
  accessID: "<API Key Access ID>"
  accessKey: "<Access Key>"
  allowedAccessIDs: 
    - p-xxxxxxx

CSP IAM Authentication

While running your K8s cluster inside your cloud environment, you can use AWS IAM, or Azure Active Directory, using machine-to-machine authentication between Akeyless and your Cloud Service Provider with a list of allowed AccessIDs that will be authorized to request access.

AWS IAM

AWS IAM can be used in the following approach:

  • Instance IAM Role

While working with an IAM Role associated with the instance himself, you can simply provide your AWS IAM Access ID as your accessID, with a list of allowedAccessIDs that will be authorized to request access:

privilegedAccess:
  accessID: "<AWS IAM Access ID>"
  allowedAccessIDs: 
    - p-xxxxxxx

Azure Active Directory

Azure AD authentication is provided to AKS clusters with OpenID Connect. OpenID Connect is an identity layer built on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. Akeyless treats Azure as a trusted third party and verifies entities based on a JWT signed by the Azure Active Directory for the configured tenant.

Set your Azure Active Directory Access ID as your accessID with a list of allowedAccessIDs that will be authorized to request access:

privilegedAccess:
  accessID: "Azure AD Access ID"
  allowedAccessIDs: 
    - p-xxxxxxx

Install

helm install <RELEASE NAME> akeyless/akeyless-zero-trust-web-access -f values.yaml

Verify that both pods are up and running:

web-worker-deployment
web-dispatcher-deployment