Database Access with Amazon Keyspaces (Apache Cassandra)

Teleport can provide secure access to Amazon Keyspaces (Apache Cassandra) via the Teleport Database Service. This allows for fine-grained access control through Teleport's RBAC.

In this guide, you will:

1. Configure your Amazon Keyspaces (Apache Cassandra) database with IAM authentication.
2. Add the database to your Teleport cluster.
3. Connect to the database via Teleport.

How it works

The Teleport Database Service uses IAM authentication to communicate with Amazon Keyspaces. When a user connects to the database via Teleport, the Teleport Database Service obtains AWS credentials and authenticates to AWS as an IAM principal with permissions to access the database.

• Self-Hosted
• Teleport Enterprise Cloud

Prerequisites

• A running Teleport cluster version 16.4.8 or above. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.

• The tctl admin tool and tsh client tool.

  Visit Installation for instructions on downloading tctl and tsh.

• AWS Account with Amazon Keyspaces database and permissions to create and attach IAM policies
• The cqlsh Cassandra client installed and added to your system's PATH environment variable.
• A host, e.g., an Amazon EC2 instance, where you will run the Teleport Database Service.
• To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login, then verify that you can run tctl commands using your current credentials. For example:

  tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=[email protected]
  tctl status
  Cluster  teleport.example.com
  Version  16.4.8
  CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678

  If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequent tctl commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.

Step 1/5. Set up the Teleport Database Service

The Database Service requires a valid join token to join your Teleport cluster. Run the following tctl command and save the token output in /tmp/token on the server that will run the Database Service:

tctl tokens add --type=db --format=text
abcd123-insecure-do-not-use-this

Install Teleport on your Linux server:

1. Assign edition to one of the following, depending on your Teleport edition:

   Edition	Value
   Teleport Enterprise Cloud	cloud
   Teleport Enterprise (Self-Hosted)	enterprise
   Teleport Community Edition	oss

2. Get the version of Teleport to install. If you have automatic agent updates enabled in your cluster, query the latest Teleport version that is compatible with the updater:

   TELEPORT_DOMAIN=example.teleport.com
   TELEPORT_VERSION="$(curl https://$TELEPORT_DOMAIN/v1/webapi/automaticupgrades/channel/default/version | sed 's/v//')"

   Otherwise, get the version of your Teleport cluster:

   TELEPORT_DOMAIN=example.teleport.com
   TELEPORT_VERSION="$(curl https://$TELEPORT_DOMAIN/v1/webapi/ping | jq -r '.server_version')"

3. Install Teleport on your Linux server:

   curl https://cdn.teleport.dev/install-v16.4.8.sh | bash -s ${TELEPORT_VERSION} edition

   The installation script detects the package manager on your Linux server and uses it to install Teleport binaries. To customize your installation, learn about the Teleport package repositories in the installation guide.

sudo teleport db configure create \   -o file \  --token=/tmp/token \  --proxy=teleport.example.com:443 \  --name=keyspaces \  --protocol=cassandra \  --aws-account-id=12345678912 \  --aws-region=us-east-1 \  --labels=env=dev

sudo teleport db configure create \   -o file \  --token=/tmp/token \  --proxy=mytenant.teleport.sh:443 \  --name=keyspaces \  --protocol=cassandra \  --aws-account-id=12345678912 \  --aws-region=us-east-1 \  --labels=env=dev

Grant the Teleport Database Service access to credentials that it can use to authenticate to AWS.

• If you are running the Teleport Database Service on an EC2 instance, you may use the EC2 Instance Metadata Service method
• If you are running the Teleport Database Service in Kubernetes, you can use IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA)
• Otherwise, you must use environment variables

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=00000000000000000000
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=<YOUR_REGION>

Configure the Teleport Database Service to start automatically when the host boots up by creating a systemd service for it. The instructions depend on how you installed the Teleport Database Service.

sudo systemctl enable teleport
sudo systemctl start teleport

sudo teleport install systemd -o /etc/systemd/system/teleport.service
sudo systemctl enable teleport
sudo systemctl start teleport

You can check the status of the Teleport Database Service with systemctl status teleport and view its logs with journalctl -fu teleport.

Step 2/5. Create a Teleport user

tctl users add \  --roles=access \  --db-users="*" \  --db-names="*" \  alice

tctl users add \  --roles=access,requester \  --db-users="*" \  --db-names="*" \  alice

For more detailed information about database access controls and how to restrict access see RBAC documentation.

Step 3/5. Create an Amazon Keyspaces role

Create an AWS IAM Role that will be used as your Keyspaces user. Go to the IAM -> Access Management -> Roles. Press Create Role.

AWS provides the AmazonKeyspacesReadOnlyAccess and AmazonKeyspacesFullAccess IAM policies that you can incorporate into your Keyspaces user's role. You can choose AmazonKeyspacesReadOnlyAccess for read-only access to Amazon Keyspaces or AmazonKeyspacesFullAccess for full access.

Enter a role name and press "Create role".

Step 4/5. Give Teleport permissions to assume roles

Next, attach the following policy to the IAM role or IAM user the Teleport Database Service instance is using, which allows the Database Service to assume the IAM roles:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

Step 5/5. Connect

Once the Database Service has joined the cluster, log in to see the available databases:

tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=alice
tsh db ls
Name      Description Allowed Users Labels  Connect
--------- ----------- ------------- ------- -------
keyspaces             [*]           env=dev

tsh login --proxy=mytenant.teleport.sh --user=alice
tsh db ls
Name      Description Allowed Users Labels  Connect
--------- ----------- ------------- ------- -------
keyspaces             [*]           env=dev

To connect to a particular database instance using the KeyspacesReader AWS IAM Keyspaces role as a database user:

tsh db connect --db-user=KeyspacesReader keyspaces
Connected to Amazon Keyspaces at localhost:55084
[cqlsh 6.0.0 | Cassandra 3.11.2 | CQL spec 3.4.4 | Native protocol v4]
Use HELP for help.
KeyspacesReader@cqlsh>

To log out of the database and remove credentials:

Remove credentials for a particular database instance.
tsh db logout keyspaces
Remove credentials for all database instances.
tsh db logout

Further reading

• How Amazon Keyspaces works with IAM
• What is Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)?

Next steps

• Learn how to restrict access to certain users and databases.

• View the High Availability (HA) guide.

• Take a look at the YAML configuration reference.

• See the full CLI reference.