Boundary

Boundary is the application that suits the need of those who want to connect to any system, anywhere, based on remotely-verified and secured identity checkups.

When a user tries to connect to a production system that is located in a private network, they face a lot of challenging issues like the difficult onboarding process for getting access to required credentials for the task (SSH keys, VPN credentials, apps' credentials, or IP addresses), the network risk exposure, IP management in a dynamic environment, etc.

Given the difficulty and the risks you expose your system and employees to, Boundary comes in handy, as it introduces a different type of model and workflow structure for handling remote access. It sets at the core of its structure the concept of trusted identity. This refers to the process of defining the users that are allowed to connect to and access a specific kind of resource. The whole method is based on logical sets of systems, well correlated, for granting access to specific users.

As such, there are the following important aspects that need to be defined: the users —  the individual entities that try to access a certain system and the groups — a collection of users that enable access management. The roles will map users and groups to a set of grants (permission levels that enable users to conduct actions in the system).

The app's workflow follows some simple software configuration steps: install and configure the environment, initiate the dev mode (or, alternatively, try to initiate a non-dev environment), authenticate, get the access authorization, and access different hosts and services.

The tool enables fully-authenticated and system-authorized sessions via a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), and it also allows you to get full control over each user's session details (log time, events, traces, with the possibility to export this data to business intelligence or event monitoring tools).

In order to get started with HashiCorp's Boundary in dev mode, you need to have previously installed and configured Docker, a proper route to download and later execute a Postgres Docker image inside a Docker container, and the Boundary binary in your PATH (or simply place the Boundary.exe in the directory located at C:\WINDOWS\system32).

After going through the initial configuration process, you can access the tool's GUI inside the browser at http://127.0.0.1:9200 or you can continue using the CLI commands. However, to conclude the part about the dev configuration process, it is important to remember that the dev mode is not recommended to be used in a production environment, but for getting Boundary to work with a Postgres database.