SPIFFE Federation

Federation allows a relationship to be established between your Teleport Workload Identity trust domain and another trust domain, enabling workloads within the two trust domains to validate each other's identities. This can be used to allow workloads within different environments or different organizations to communicate securely.

SPIFFE sets out a standard for federation that allows trust domains managed by different implementations to federate with one another. For example, a trust domain managed by Teleport Workload Identity could federate with a trust domain managed by SPIRE.

The SPIFFE Federation process relies on the exchange of trust bundles between the trust domains. These trust bundles contain the certificates and public keys of the trust domain's issuer that are required to validate the identities that it has issued.

Federation relationships are "one way" meaning that workloads within one trust domain can validate the identities of workloads in the other trust domain, but workloads in the other trust domain cannot validate the identities of workloads in the first trust domain. It is therefore typical to establish the federation relationship in both directions.

SPIFFE Federation support was introduced in Teleport version 16.3.0. Both your Teleport Auth Service and tbot agent must be running at least this version.

Federation to Teleport Workload Identity

This section discusses how to configure another trust domain to trust a Teleport Workload Identity hosted trust domain.

In order to configure a trust domain to trust Teleport Workload Identity, the control plane of the trust domain must be able to access the SPIFFE Bundle Endpoint exposed on the Teleport Proxy Service.

The Teleport Workload Identity SPIFFE Bundle Endpoint implements the "https_web" profile as defined by the SPIFFE Federation specification. This means that the endpoint is served using the standard web TLS certificates configured for your Teleport Proxy.

The SPIFFE Bundle Endpoint is exposed on the Teleport Proxy Service at the path /webapi/spiffe/bundle.json.

Federation from Teleport Workload Identity

This section discusses how to configure a Teleport Workload Identity hosted trust domain to trust another trust domain.

Teleport Workload Identity only supports federating with trust domains that offer a SPIFFE Bundle Endpoint that abides by the "https_web" profile as defined by the SPIFFE Federation specification.

The spiffe_federation resource configures a trust relationship between the Teleport Workload Identity trust domain and a remote trust domain.

For example, to federate with a trust domain named example.com that has a SPIFFE Bundle Endpoint at https://example.com/spiffe/bundle.json, you would create a spiffe_federation resource like so:

kind: spiffe_federation
version: v1
metadata:
  name: example.com
spec:
  bundle_source:
    https_web:
      bundle_endpoint_url: https://example.com/spiffe/bundle.json

A background process will periodically fetch the trust bundle from the remote trust domain according to the refresh hint provided by the remote trust domain.

You can check the status of the federation relationship using the tctl CLI:

tctl get spiffe_federation/example.com

This will show the last fetched bundle, the time it was fetched, and the time that the next fetch is scheduled.

Once the resource has been created and has successfully been synced, tbot will begin to serve the federated trust bundle to your workloads via the Workload API.

Next steps

• Workload Identity Overview: Overview of Teleport Workload Identity.
• Best Practices: Best practices for using Workload Identity in Production.
• Read the configuration reference to explore all the available configuration options.
• Read the SPIFFE Federation Specification to understand the technical details of SPIFFE Federation.