Vault: Managing Access to Groups and Policies

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to configure Grant Kits to automate access requests to an admin access either by:

1. Adding yourself to an "oncall" vault group via vault_identity_group_member_entity_ids, or

2. Assigning the admin policy directly to yourself via vault_identity_group_member_entity_ids.

This use case models Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) using core Vault components.

We will be using the Vault Starter Kit as a base and replace configuration stubs for our use case.

Before you start

1. Make sure you have:

   • An Abbey account

   • An Abbey API Token

   • An Vault account

2. Make sure you setup:

   1. An Vault Starter Kit by following Get a Starter Kit

   2. A Connection to a repo by following Connect a Repo

Step 1: Set Up Vault

Make sure your Vault account is good and ready to go. This Starter Kit will be creating 3 vault resources listed in vault.tf:

1. vault_policy.admin_policy

2. vault_identity_group.oncall

3. vault_identity_entity.user1

so make sure these don't already exist on your account to avoid conflicts.

Step 2: Configure Your Grant Kit

Configure Output

Grant Kits rely on your GitHub account and repository name to output access changes, which we'll set through Terraform local variables. Update the locals block in main.tf with your account_name and repo_name

main.tf

 locals {
  account_name = "" #CHANGEME
  repo_name = "" #CHANGEME
  ...
}

Configure Reviewers

Workflow defines who should approve an access request.

Let's update the reviewers block by adding yourself as the reviewer by switching [e-mail] with the email address you use to sign into Abbey.

main.tf

 resource "abbey_grant_kit" "..." {
   ...
   workflow = {
     steps = [
       {
         reviewers = {
-          one_of = ["[e-mail]"] # CHANGEME
+          one_of = ["[e-mail]"]

Step 3: Link Vault with Abbey

Now you'll need to link Vault with Abbey.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ABBEY_API_TOKEN" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  https://api.abbey.io/v1/users/<user_id>/apps \
  -d '{"type": "vault", "data": {"user_id": "<your Vault User ID>"}}'

Step 4: Deploy Your Starter Kit

First, add your GitHub-related secrets to your repo:

• VAULT_ADDR

• VAULT_TOKEN

• ABBEY_TOKEN

You can find the VAULT_ADDR and VAULT_TOKEN by going to https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com and clicking on your Vault cluster for its details. ABBEY_TOKEN is your API token.

To deploy your Starter Kit, follow instructions from Deploy Your Grant Kit.

Step 5: Automate Access Management

🎉 Congratulations! Abbey is now managing permissions to your Resource for you. 🎉

You can now start requesting and approving access by following the Request Access and Approve or Deny Access Requests guides.

Abbey strives to help you automate and secure access management without being intrusive.

To that end, this Pull Request contains native Terraform HCL code using normal open source Terraform Provider libraries. It represents the permissions change. In this case, it's just a simple creation of a new Terraform Resource.

Step 6: Check approved requests in Vault

Go to the vault UI and confirm that the user is either (1) assigned to the oncall group, or (2) assigned the admin policy, depending on the resource you requested on Abbey.

Next Steps

To learn more about what you can configure, try one of the Data Integration tutorials. You can also look at Infrastructure Integrations or get set up with a TACOS of your choice.

For more information on how Abbey works, visit the Key Concepts or Grant Kits page.