Database Access with Snowflake

Teleport can provide secure access to Snowflake via the Teleport Database Service. This allows for fine-grained access control through Teleport's RBAC.

In this guide, you will:

1. Configure your Snowflake database with key pair authentication.
2. Add the database to your Teleport cluster.
3. Connect to the database via Teleport.

How it works

The Teleport Database Service communicates with Snowflake using HTTP messages that contain JSON web tokens signed by the Teleport certificate authority for database clients. Snowflake is configured to trust the Teleport database client CA. When a user connects to Snowflake via Teleport, the Database Service forwards the user's requests to Snowflake as Teleport-authenticated messages.

• 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.

• Snowflake account with SECURITYADMIN role or higher.

• snowsql installed and added to your system's PATH environment variable.

• A host where you will run the Teleport Database Service.

  See Installation for details.

• 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=teleport.example.com:443 \   --name=example-snowflake \   --protocol=snowflake \   --uri=abc12345.snowflakecomputing.com \   --labels=env=dev 

sudo teleport db configure create \   -o file \   --token=/tmp/token \   --proxy=mytenant.teleport.sh:443 \   --name=example-snowflake \   --protocol=snowflake \   --uri=abc12345.snowflakecomputing.com \   --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

JOIN_TOKEN=$(cat /tmp/token)
helm install teleport-kube-agent teleport/teleport-kube-agent \  --create-namespace \  --namespace teleport-agent \  --set roles=db \  --set proxyAddr=teleport.example.com:443 \  --set authToken=${JOIN_TOKEN?} \  --set "databases[0].name=example-snowflake" \  --set "databases[0].uri=abc12345.snowflakecomputing.com" \  --set "databases[0].protocol=snowflake" \  --set "databases[0].static_labels.env=dev" \  --version 17.0.0-dev

JOIN_TOKEN=$(cat /tmp/token)
helm install teleport-kube-agent teleport/teleport-kube-agent \  --create-namespace \  --namespace teleport-agent \  --set roles=db \  --set proxyAddr=mytenant.teleport.sh:443 \  --set authToken=${JOIN_TOKEN?} \  --set "databases[0].name=example-snowflake" \  --set "databases[0].uri=abc12345.snowflakecomputing.com" \  --set "databases[0].protocol=snowflake" \  --set "databases[0].static_labels.env=dev" \  --version 16.4.7

kubectl -n teleport-agent get pods
NAME                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGEteleport-kube-agent-0   1/1     Running   0          32s

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. Export a public key

Use the tctl auth sign command below to export a public key for your Snowflake user:

tctl auth sign --format=snowflake --out=server

The command will create a server.pub file with Teleport's public key. Teleport will use the corresponding private key to generate a JWT (JSON Web Token) that will be used to authenticate to Snowflake.

Step 4/5. Add the public key to your Snowflake user

Use the public key you generated earlier to enable key pair authentication.

Log in to your Snowflake instance and execute the SQL statement below:

alter user alice set rsa_public_key='MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAv3dHYw4LJCcZzdbhb3hV...LwIDAQAB';

In this statement, alice is the name of the Snowflake user and the rsa_public_key is the key generated earlier without the PEM header/footer (first and the last line).

You can use the describe user command to verify the user's public key:

desc user alice;

See the Snowflake documentation for more details.

Step 5/5. Connect

Log in to your Teleport cluster and see the available databases:

tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=alice
tsh db ls
Name              Description         Labels
----------------- ------------------- --------
example-snowflake Example Snowflake ❄ env=dev

tsh login --proxy=mytenant.teleport.sh --user=alice
tsh db ls
Name              Description         Labels
----------------- ------------------- --------
example-snowflake Example Snowflake ❄ env=dev

To retrieve credentials for a database and connect to it:

tsh db connect --db-user=alice --db-name=SNOWFLAKE_SAMPLE_DATA example-snowflake

The snowsql command-line client should be available in the system PATH in order to be able to connect.

To log out of the database and remove credentials:

Remove credentials for a particular database instance.
tsh db logout example-snowflake
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.