Tailscale management-plane policy

Source: docs/11-tailscale-management.md at 2081f31a099e · docs version 0.4.0

Tailscale connectivity is private transport, not authorization by itself. A new tailnet’s permissive default policy must be replaced before treating it as the only management path.

tailscale-policy.example.json is syntactically valid JSON and separates:

• a network grant from one operator group to TCP 22 on tag:agent-host; and
• a Tailscale SSH rule with action: check, including privileged root access.

Replace [email protected] with one controlled identity and validate the policy in the Tailscale admin console before saving it. Add other ports only for an explicitly authenticated operator service. Do not use Funnel for a secure host, and do not automatically publish agent APIs with Tailscale Serve. Tailnet-visible is still reachable by every identity the policy allows.

Protect the identity provider with phishing-resistant hardware-backed MFA. Enable Tailnet Lock only after provisioning at least two independent signing nodes and testing the recovery procedure. Keep auth keys and lock signing keys out of Nix expressions and the Nix store.

The template cannot confirm the remote admin-console policy from local Nix evaluation. The security doctor checks local tailscale serve status --json for active Serve/Funnel state and reports a blocked local API as unknown, but the operator must still inspect and validate the remotely active policy; neither restrictive grants nor SSH rules are inferred from tentaflake.tailscale.enable = true.