Database Access with Cassandra and ScyllaDB

Teleport can provide secure access to Cassandra or ScyllaDB via the Teleport Database Service. This allows for fine-grained access control through the Teleport RBAC system.

The Teleport Database Service proxies traffic from database clients to self-hosted databases in your infrastructure. Teleport maintains a certificate authority for database clients. You configure your database to trust the Teleport database client CA, and the Teleport Database Service presents certificates signed by this CA when proxying user traffic. With this setup, there is no need to store long-lived credentials for self-hosted databases.

Meanwhile, the Teleport Database Service verifies self-hosted databases by checking their TLS certificates against either the Teleport database CA or a custom CA chosen by the user.

In this guide, you will:

1. Configure your Cassandra or ScyllaDB database for Teleport access.
2. Add the database to your Teleport cluster.
3. Connect to the database via Teleport.

How it works

The Teleport Database Service authenticates to your self-hosted Cassandra or ScyllaDB database using mutual TLS. Cassandra or ScyllaDB trusts the Teleport certificate authority for database clients, and presents a certificate signed by either the Teleport database CA or a custom CA. When a user initiates a database session, the Teleport Database Service presents a certificate signed by Teleport. The authenticated connection then proxies client traffic from the user.

• Self-Hosted
• Teleport Enterprise Cloud

Prerequisites

• A running Teleport cluster version 17.0.0-dev 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.

• Self-hosted Cassandra or ScyllaDB instance.
• The cqlsh Cassandra client installed and added to your system's PATH environment variable.
• Optional: a certificate authority that issues certificates for your self-hosted database.
• 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@example.com
  tctl status
  Cluster  teleport.example.com
  Version  17.0.0-dev
  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 and configure Teleport where you will run the Teleport Database Service:

sudo teleport db configure create \   -o file \   --token=/tmp/token \   --proxy=example.teleport.sh \   --name=cassandra \   --protocol=cassandra \   --uri=cassandra.example.com:9042 \   --labels=env=dev 

sudo teleport db configure create \   -o file \   --token=/tmp/token \   --proxy=example.teleport.sh:443 \   --name=cassandra \   --protocol=cassandra \   --uri=cassandra.example.com:9042 \   --trust_system_cert_pool \   --labels=env=dev

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

helm repo add teleport https://charts.releases.teleport.dev

helm repo update

roles: db
proxyAddr: example.teleport.sh
# Set to false if using Teleport Community Edition
enterprise: true
authToken: "JOIN_TOKEN"
databases:
  - name: cassandra
    uri: cassandra.example.com:9042
    protocol: cassandra
    static_labels:
      env: dev

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. Set up mutual TLS

Teleport uses mutual TLS authentication with self-hosted databases. These databases must be configured with Teleport's certificate authority to be able to verify client certificates. They also need a certificate/key pair that Teleport can verify.

To use issue certificates from your workstation with tctl, your Teleport user must be allowed to impersonate the system role Db.

Include the following allow rule in in your Teleport user's role:

allow:
  impersonate:
    users: ["Db"]
    roles: ["Db"]

Follow the instructions below to generate TLS credentials for your database.

Cassandra

When connecting to Cassandra, sign the certificate for the hostname over which Teleport will be connecting to it:

tctl auth sign --format=cassandra --host=cassandra.example.com --out=server --ttl=2190h

The command will create two files:

• server.keystore with generated private key and user certificate in JKS format.
• server.truststore with Teleport's certificate authority in JKS format.

If you want to use an existing certificate authority to sign certificates for Cassandra, rather than the Teleport database client CA, discard server.keystore and use a keystore generated by your existing CA instead.

Scylla

Teleport uses mutual TLS authentication with self-hosted databases. These databases must be able to verify certificates presented by the Teleport Database Service. Self-hosted databases also need a certificate/key pair that Teleport can verify.

By default, the Teleport Database Service trusts certificates issued by a certificate authority managed by the Teleport Auth Service. You can either:

• Configure your self-hosted database to trust this CA, and instruct Teleport to issue a certificate for the database to present to the Teleport Database Service.
• Configure the Database Service to trust a custom CA.

Step 4/5. Configure Cassandra/Scylla

Follow the instructions for your database to enable TLS communication with your Teleport cluster:

client_encryption_options:
  enabled: true
  optional: false
  keystore: /path/to/server.keystore
  keystore_password: "password"
  require_client_auth: true
  truststore: /path/to/server.truststore
  truststore_password: "password"
  protocol: TLS
  algorithm: SunX509
  store_type: JKS
  cipher_suites: [TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA]

client_encryption_options:
  enabled: true
  certificate: /path/to/server.crt
  keyfile: /path/to/server.key
  truststore:  /path/to/server.cas
  require_client_auth: True

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
--------- ----------------- ------------- ------- -------
cassandra Cassandra Example [*]           env=dev

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

To connect to a particular database instance :

tsh db connect --db-user=cassandra cassandra
Password:
Connected to Test Cluster at localhost:49594
[cqlsh 6.0.0 | Cassandra 4.0.5 | CQL spec 3.4.5 | Native protocol v5]
Use HELP for help.
cassandra@cqlsh>

To log out of the database and remove credentials:

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

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.