Boundary for privileged access management

Boundary provides security controls commonly associated with privileged access management, including identity-aware access, just-in-time session authorization, credential brokering and injection, session auditing, administrative termination, and recording. Boundary also provides automation-friendly workflows through its API, CLI, SDK, and Terraform provider.

What is privileged access management (PAM)?

Privileged access management (PAM) tools secure access to critical systems by managing and monitoring access to privileged accounts. PAM helps organizations reduce their attack surface and limit the potential impact of compromised credentials, excessive privileges, insider threats, and external attacks. Traditional PAM tools focus on managing privileged credentials and monitoring sessions and commands that help detection and response teams investigate incidents.

Boundary authorizes and proxies access to privileged systems, records session and authorization metadata, enables administrators to terminate active sessions, and supports session recording. You can integrate Boundary with a Vault credential store to broker or inject credentials when authorized users connect to targets. Vault can generate and manage dynamic credentials, while Boundary governs access to the target and establishes the authorized session.

How Boundary differs from traditional PAM architectures

Boundary's differentiation from traditional PAM architectures comes from its combination of identity-aware, proxy-based access, API-driven configuration, dynamic host discovery, and automation-friendly workflows. Instead of relying on manually maintained bastion hosts, static endpoint inventories, or credentials distributed to users, Boundary authorizes each session and routes connections through eligible workers.

You can configure and manage Boundary programmatically through its REST API, CLI, SDK, and Terraform provider. It provides automation-friendly workflows for managing identities, roles, hosts, targets, credential sources, and session authorization and can automatically discover and synchronize infrastructure resources from supported cloud providers:

• Automated credential management: Boundary can integrate with Vault to retrieve short-lived or dynamically generated credentials for authorized sessions. With credential injection, Boundary supplies supported credentials to the target without exposing those credentials to the user. With credential brokering, Boundary returns credentials to the user for use in the connection workflow.
• Context-based access: Boundary's managed groups dynamically assign permissions based on identity-provider MFA checks, group memberships, and other IdP-level context. For example, on-call engineers can have different permissions during and after their on-call shifts.
• Host discovery: Boundary's dynamic host catalogs automate the onboarding of new or changed infrastructure resources, synchronize their connection information, and apply preconfigured security policies.
• Multi-hop sessions: Boundary chains workers across network boundaries to reach targets in segmented networks without exposing private systems to the public internet. Multi-hop sessions support complex network topologies and outbound-only network policies.
• Transparent sessions: Boundary lets authorized users connect to targets through familiar DNS-like aliases without entering Boundary resource identifiers or ephemeral proxy ports. The Boundary Client Agent intercepts eligible DNS requests and routes authorized connections through Boundary in the background.

Can Boundary replace a PAM solution?

Boundary can replace a traditional PAM solution for use cases centered on identity-aware access to infrastructure, just-in-time session authorization, credential brokering or injection, dynamic host discovery, session auditing, administrative termination, and session recording. Boundary can complement an existing PAM solution. For example, Boundary can provide identity-aware connectivity, target discovery, and worker-based session proxying, while Vault can complement Boundary by managing secrets and generating dynamic credentials. Other PAM products may be appropriate when the control is required on the endpoint, privileged account, application, or command rather than at the access-session layer.

Refer also to Boundary vs. software-defined perimeter and Boundary vs. secrets management tools.