Overview

A Cluster is a logical grouping of Banyan Access Tiers that are managed together for a given Organization. A Banyan Cluster includes a Private PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) to distribute cryptographic identities (X.509 Certificates) to clients and services in your organization.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

As in the diagram below, the Banyan component called Shield manages a private PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), also known as an Internal CA (Certificate Authority), to distribute cryptographic identities (typically X.509 Certificates) to clients and services in your organization.

Netagents running on Linux Hosts talk directly to Shield to receive certificates on behalf of workloads and services. The Banyan App (or other clients) communicate with Shield via the Command Center’s RESTful APIs.

Certificates Issued

Banyan issues server certificates for hosted services and SSH servers.

Cert Nickname	Format	Subject CN / KeyID	Validity Period	Server Name and Purpose
ServiceCert	X.509	Banyan Service ...	1 year (auto-rotated every 24 hours)	Banyan Service, to secure hosted services
HostCert	SSH	ssh-rsa-cert ... host	1 year	Linux Host, for SSH authentication

Banyan also issues various types of client certificates for use in different client authentication scenarios.

Cert Nickname	Format	Subject CN / KeyID	Validity Period	Client Name and Purpose
DeviceCert	X.509	ManagedDevice-BNN ...	1 year (revoke via OCSP)	Banyan Desktop App, for device registration
TrustCert	X.509	Banyan Client ...	24 hours (adjustable)	Banyan Desktop App, for access to TCP Services
WorkloadCert	X.509	Banyan Netagent ...	1 year (auto-rotated every 24 hours)	Linux Workloads, for service-to-service authNZ
SSHCert	SSH	ssh-rsa-cert ... user	24 hours (adjustable)	Banyan Desktop App, for SSH authentication

Banyan “decorates” the certificates issued by Shield with client and server information.

For X.509 certificates, we use X.509 Subject Alternative Name - SAN, an extension to X.509 that allows various values to be associated with a certificate using a subjectAltName field. In server X.509 certs, the SAN field DNS Name contains the Banyan ServiceName. In client X.509 certs, the SAN field DNS Name contains the client’s Roles.

For SSH certificates, Banyan used the Principals field. In client SSH cert, the Principals field contains the client’s Roles.

Sections

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