Remoteler automates Certificate Authority (CA) management and issues short-lived and scoped certificates for SSH, RDP, Kubernetes, and database authentication.

Remoteler comes with its own ssh client – tsh. When a user types ssh host command, Remoteler will check if a user has a valid SSH certificate in the ~/.tsh directory or loaded into an ssh-agent. If no certificate is found, it will trigger the login sequence.

A user can force the login sequence by executing:

$ tsh login --proxy=customer.remoteler.com

This command takes the Remoteler Proxy Service’s address as an argument.

The diagram below illustrates the login sequence. Remoteler authentication uses SAML 2.0/OIDC Connect/OAuth2 family of protocols, depending on the identity store. In this example the identity store is Github:

1. The client requests a certificate via tsh login. This command launches a web browser on a client’s machine and directs it to a Remoteler Proxy Service.
2. The Remoteler Proxy Service redirects the user to Github’s login page, using Github’s 2FA.
3. Upon successful Github authentication, the browser is redirected back to the proxy, which forwards user identity to the Remoteler Auth Service.
4. The Remoteler Auth Service issues a certificate with a configured time to live (TTL) and it is returned to the client.

Upon successful authentication, an SSH certificate will be stored in the user’s ~/.tsh/keys directory and loaded into an ssh-agent, if there is one running. If Kubernetes support is enabled, an x509 certificate for Kubernetes will be stored there as well, and ~/.kube/config will be updated with it.

The Remoteler client stores the Remoteler Proxy Service URL in ~/.tsh/profile. The user does not need to use the –proxy flag again. They can edit the profile file when connecting to multiple Remoteler clusters.

SAML, OAuth2, and web browsers are great for interactive authentication for humans.

If authentication is needed for legacy automation similar to Jenkins, which relies on SSH credentials, a Remoteler administrator can issue a certificate via:

$ tctl auth sign -o jenkins.cert

It is recommended that such certificates be stored in secure storage.

When a user is authenticated, they can establish SSH and Kubernetes connections to a cluster:

# using SSH
$ tsh ssh hostname

# using K8s
$ kubectl get pods

The Remoteler client is called tsh, but you can rename it ssh, and this enables full command-line compatibility with OpenSSH client.

The diagram below shows how a connection is established:

• The client dials to the Remoteler Proxy Service specified in ~/.tsh/profile file and relays to it the hostname of the destination hostname.
• Remoteler Proxy Service does not perform any decryption or authentication*, it simply performs a name resolution for the given hostname and tries to relay the SSH connection to it. The user connection is shown in green.
• The destination host validates the user’s certificate and begins logging user actions to the Remoteler Auth Service using its audit connection. The connection between a host and the Remoteler Auth Service is also authenticated via the host’s certificate and encrypted. The audit connection is shown in red.
• If the destination host is a remote host, such as an IoT node (self-driving vehicle or a smart device) the connection is established using the reverse tunnel that remote nodes always maintain.

* By default, connections are encrypted end to end, but Remoteler also supports the recording proxy legacy mode if the audit is required for legacy sshd daemons. In this mode, the proxy decrypts the connection and sends the audit information to the Remoteler Auth Service.

Unlike traditional OpenSSH-based workflows, Remoteler allows users to log out. “Logging out” means erasing previously obtained certificates from a client machine.

$ tsh logout