Professional-Cloud-Security-Engineer Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud Security Engineer Questions and Answers

Encrypt non-sensitive data with Google default encryption:

Google Cloud automatically encrypts data at rest using AES-256 by default. This minimizes key management complexity for non-sensitive data as it is handled entirely by Google.

No additional setup is required for default encryption, ensuring low latency access to the encrypted data.

Encrypt sensitive data with Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS):

Cloud KMS allows you to create and manage cryptographic keys in a centralized cloud service.

To meet the requirement of scheduling key rotation, configure Cloud KMS to automatically rotate keys on a regular schedule (e.g., every 90 days).

Control the region where the keys are stored by selecting the appropriate key ring location during key creation. This ensures compliance with data residency requirements.

Cloud KMS provides low-latency access to keys, ensuring minimal impact on data access performance.

References:

Cloud Key Management Service Documentation

Encryption at Rest in Google Cloud

Use Cloud External Key Management (EKM) that integrates with an external Hardware Security Module (HSM) system from supported vendors: Cloud EKM allows you to use encryption keys that are managed externally to Google Cloud. This means you can generate and store your keys in an on-premises HSM or another supported external HSM service, and integrate these keys with various Google Cloud services.

Integration with Google Services: Cloud EKM integrates seamlessly with many Google Cloud services, including BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and more. This provides you with full control over your encryption keys while still taking advantage of Google Cloud's powerful services.

References

Cloud External Key Management (EKM) documentation

External Key Management overview

To ensure that data is encrypted while in use by the virtual machines (VMs) and enforce this policy across your organization, you should use Confidential VM instances. Here are the steps:

Enable Confidential VM:

Ensure that Confidential VMs are available in your selected regions and enabled for your project.

Set Organization Policy:

Implement an organization policy to enforce the use of Confidential VM instances for all VMs across your organization.

Use the Google Cloud Console or the gcloud command-line tool to set this policy. Example command:

gcloud resource-manager org-policies set-policy my_policy.yaml

Example my_policy.yaml:

name: organizations/1234567890/policies/compute.requireConfidentialCompute spec: rules: - enforce: true

Verify and Monitor:

Ensure that all newly created VMs across your organization are Confidential VMs.

Regularly monitor compliance through the Google Cloud Console and set up alerts if non-compliant VMs are created.

Benefits:

Data Encryption in Use: Confidential VMs ensure that data is encrypted not just at rest and in transit but also while in use.

Policy Enforcement: Organization policies provide a way to enforce security configurations across all projects under your organization.

References

Confidential Computing Documentation

Creating and Managing Organization Policies

To meet data residency requirements on Google Cloud, the recommended option is to use Organization Policy Service constraints. This service allows you to define and enforce specific constraints across your organization, including constraints related to the geographical location where data is stored.

Organization Policy Service constraints allow administrators to enforce policies that restrict resources to specific locations. For instance, you can set policies to ensure that all storage buckets, databases, and other data resources reside within specific geographic boundaries. This helps in complying with data residency requirements.

References

Organization Policy Service documentation

Google Cloud Data Residency

To identify all principals who can change firewall rules, you need to determine which users or service accounts have permissions that allow them to modify firewall rules in your Google Cloud project. The correct permissions to check for this are compute.firewalls.create and compute.firewalls.delete. These permissions enable a user to create and delete firewall rules, respectively.

The Policy Analyzer tool in Google Cloud allows you to query and analyze IAM policies to identify which principals have specific permissions. By using Policy Analyzer, you can effectively identify all principals with the compute.firewalls.create and compute.firewalls.delete permissions.

Open Policy Analyzer: Go to the Google Cloud Console, navigate to IAM & Admin, and select Policy Analyzer.

Set Up Query: Create a new query specifying the permissions compute.firewalls.create and compute.firewalls.delete.

Run Query: Execute the query to retrieve a list of principals who have these permissions.

Review Results: Analyze the results to identify all users and service accounts with the capability to modify firewall rules.

This method ensures you have a comprehensive list of all principals who can change firewall rules, enhancing your audit and security posture.

References:

Google Cloud Policy Analyzer Documentation

Google Cloud IAM Documentation

The Organization Administrator and Super Admin roles have extensive administrative privileges at the organization level. Restricting these roles is crucial to limit the number of users who have the ability to manage critical resources and configurations within the organization, thereby enhancing security and minimizing potential risks.

Organization Administrator: Has comprehensive permissions to manage all aspects of the Google Cloud organization, including projects, folders, and IAM policies.

Super Admin: In Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), the Super Admin has access to all administrative features and can manage user accounts, services, and settings across the organization.

References:

Google Cloud IAM roles

Managing super admin roles in Google Workspace

"To support common use cases like setting a Time to Live (TTL) for objects, retaining noncurrent versions of objects, or "downgrading" storage classes of objects to help manage costs, Cloud Storage offers the Object Lifecycle Management feature. This page describes the feature as well as the options available when using it. To learn how to enable Object Lifecycle Management, and for examples of lifecycle policies, see Managing Lifecycles." https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/lifecycle

Setting up a Shared VPC allows you to create a centrally managed network that spans multiple projects. Here's how you can achieve this while ensuring separation of duties:

Create a Host Project:

Create a project that will act as the host project for your Shared VPC.

Configure Shared VPC:

In the host project, enable the Shared VPC feature.

Create Service Projects:

Create separate service projects for different teams, such as developers and other stakeholders.

Assign Roles:

Security Team: Grant the Compute Network Admin role. This allows the security team to manage network resources, such as firewall rules, subnets, and routes.

Developers: Share the host project’s network with the service projects. Assign roles like Compute Instance Admin to developers in the service projects, enabling them to create and manage VM instances without altering network configurations.

Firewall Management:

The security team will define and manage firewall rules within the host project, ensuring consistent and secure network policies.

Benefits:

Separation of Duties: Security teams handle networking, and developers focus on application deployment and management.

Centralized Control: Network policies are centrally managed, ensuring compliance and security.

Scalability: Easy to add new projects and teams without compromising the overall network security.

References

Google Cloud VPC Documentation

Managing Resources with Shared VPC

The Standard Tier network only provides regional load balancing, while the Premium Tier supports global load balancing with a single anycast IP address. To distribute requests across multiple regions, you need to use the Premium Tier and update the load balancer configuration accordingly.

Steps:

Upgrade to Premium Tier: Update the load balancer to use the Premium Tier network in the Google Cloud Console.

Add New Instance Group: Add the instance group in the new region (us-east-2) to the backend configuration of the existing load balancer.

Verify Configuration: Ensure that the frontend configuration of the load balancer uses a single external IP address for global distribution.

References:

Google Cloud: Global load balancing

To ensure that payment information is encrypted between the customer’s browser and Google Cloud Platform during checkout, the company should configure an SSL certificate on an L7 (Layer 7) Load Balancer. Here’s why this is the best solution:

SSL/TLS Termination: An L7 Load Balancer can handle SSL/TLS termination, which means it can decrypt HTTPS traffic, offloading the work from the backend servers. This is essential for handling encrypted connections securely.

HTTPS Configuration: By configuring an SSL certificate, the load balancer ensures that all traffic between the customer’s browser and the application is encrypted using HTTPS.

Security Best Practices: Using an L7 Load Balancer with an SSL certificate aligns with best practices for securing web applications, particularly for e-commerce sites handling sensitive payment information.

Managed Certificates: Google Cloud offers managed SSL certificates, which simplifies the process of obtaining, deploying, and renewing SSL certificates.

Implementation Steps:

Obtain an SSL certificate.

Configure the L7 Load Balancer in the GCP Console.

Associate the SSL certificate with the load balancer.

Ensure that the backend services are configured to handle HTTPS traffic.

References:

Google Cloud Load Balancing Documentation

Setting up HTTPS Load Balancing

This PD and bucket data is encrypted using a Google-generated data encryption key (DEK) and key encryption key (KEK). The CMEK feature allows you to create, use, and revoke the key encryption key (KEK). Google still controls the data encryption key (DEK). For more information on Google data encryption keys, see Encryption at Rest. https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/docs/concepts/configuring-clusters/customer-managed-encryption

https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/encrypt-and-decrypt-data-with-cloud-kms#0

This approach allows you to leverage your existing on-premises PKI infrastructure while minimizing its impact and manual processes. By creating a subordinate CA in Google’s Certificate Authority Service, you can automate the process of issuing certificates for your HTTP load balancer frontends. This solution scales well as the number of load balancers increases.

De-identifying sensitive data Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) can de-identify sensitive data in text content, including text stored in container structures such as tables. De-identification is the process of removing identifying information from data. The API detects sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), and then uses a de-identification transformation to mask, delete, or otherwise obscure the data. For example, de-identification techniques can include any of the following: Masking sensitive data by partially or fully replacing characters with a symbol, such as an asterisk (*) or hash (#). Replacing each instance of sensitive data with a token, or surrogate, string. Encrypting and replacing sensitive data using a randomly generated or pre-determined key. When you de-identify data using the CryptoReplaceFfxFpeConfig or CryptoDeterministicConfig infoType transformations, you can re-identify that data, as long as you have the CryptoKey used to originally de-identify the data. https://cloud.google.com/dlp/docs/deidentify-sensitive-data

Cloud Bigtable is a fully managed NoSQL database service designed to handle large analytical and operational workloads. One of its key features is the ability to replicate data across multiple geographic locations automatically, ensuring high availability and resilience. Here’s a detailed explanation:

Replication: Cloud Bigtable supports multi-cluster routing and replication across different geographic regions. This means that data can be replicated across multiple zones within a region or even across regions, providing geo-redundancy.

Automatic Handling: Once configured, Bigtable automatically manages replication without requiring manual intervention. This is in line with the company's policy for long-term data storage that necessitates automatic replication over at least two geographic places.

Use Case Suitability: Bigtable is ideal for applications that require low-latency access to large amounts of data, which makes it suitable for various use cases including analytical applications, IoT, and financial data processing.

Configuration: Setting up replication involves creating instances in multiple zones and configuring them to replicate data. Google Cloud’s management interface and APIs make this straightforward to configure and monitor.

References:

Google Cloud Bigtable Documentation

Google Cloud Storage Options

Cloud DNS with DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) provides authentication for DNS responses, ensuring that they are legitimate and have not been tampered with. DNSSEC helps protect against DNS spoofing and cache poisoning attacks, which are common techniques used in DDoS attacks.

Steps:

Enable DNSSEC: In the Google Cloud Console, navigate to Cloud DNS and enable DNSSEC for your managed zones.

Configure Key Signing: Set up key signing keys (KSK) and zone signing keys (ZSK) to sign your DNS records.

Monitor DNSSEC Status: Regularly monitor the DNSSEC status and logs to ensure it is functioning correctly.

References:

Cloud DNS documentation

Managing IAM permissions at the KeyRing level is more efficient and scalable compared to managing them at the individual Key level. By creating a single KeyRing and placing all encryption keys within it, you can apply uniform IAM permissions to the entire KeyRing, simplifying the management of permissions.

Steps:

Create a KeyRing: Set up a single KeyRing in Cloud KMS for all the encryption keys required for the persistent disks.

Create Encryption Keys: Generate the necessary encryption keys within this KeyRing.

Set IAM Permissions: Assign IAM roles and permissions to the KeyRing to manage access control at this level, ensuring that all keys within the KeyRing inherit these permissions.

References:

Google Cloud: Cloud Key Management Service (KMS)

Managing access to resources

Admin activity logs are always created to log entries for API calls or other actions that modify the configuration or metadata of resources. For example, these logs record when users create VM instances or change Identity and Access Management permissions.

App Engine ingress firewall rules are available, but egress rules are not currently available. Per requirements 1.2.1 and 1.3.4, you must ensure that all outbound traffic is authorized. SAQ A-EP and SAQ D–type merchants must provide compensating controls or use a different Google Cloud product. Compute Engine and GKE are the preferred alternatives. https://cloud.google.com/solutions/pci-dss-compliance-in-gcp

The action fails because a constraints/iam.allowedPolicyMemberDomains organization policy is in place and only members from the flowlogistic.com organization are allowed. The inheritFromParent: false property on the “Apps” folder means that it does not inherit the organization policy from the organization node. Therefore, only the policy set at the folder level applies, which allows only members from the flowlogistic.com organization. As a result, the attempt to grant access to the user testuser@terramearth.com fails because this user is not a member of the flowlogistic.com organization.

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/public-access-prevention

Public access prevention protects Cloud Storage buckets and objects from being accidentally exposed to the public. If your bucket is contained within an organization, you can enforce public access prevention by using the organization policy constraint storage.publicAccessPrevention at the project, folder, or organization level.

Compute Engine doesn't automatically update the OS or the software on your deployed instances. You will need to patch or update your deployed Compute Engine instances when necessary. However, in the cloud it is not recommended that you patch or update individual running instances. Instead it is best to patch the image that was used to launch the instance and then replace each affected instance with a new copy.

To manage IAM permissions efficiently for a large engineering team with different levels of access in development and production environments, follow these steps:

Create Separate Folders:

Create a folder for the development environment.

Create a folder for the production environment.

This allows you to organize projects and apply different policies and permissions to each environment.

Navigate to IAM & Admin in the GCP Console.

Select "Folders" from the left-hand menu.

Create a new folder named "Development".

Create a new folder named "Production".

Create Google Groups:

Create Google Groups for different teams within the engineering department (e.g., Development Team, Production Team).

This helps in managing permissions centrally.

Use the Google Admin Console to create groups.

Add relevant engineers to each group.

Assign Permissions at the Folder Level:

Assign appropriate IAM roles to the Google Groups at the folder level.

For example, grant Viewer role to the Development Team group for the development folder.

Grant Editor or more restrictive roles as required for the Production Team group for the production folder.

Select the development folder.

Go to the "Permissions" tab.

Click on "Add" and enter the email address of the Development Team Google Group.

Assign the "Viewer" role.

Repeat for the production folder, assigning appropriate roles to the Production Team Google Group.

By following these steps, you create a clear separation between development and production environments and manage permissions efficiently using Google Groups and folders.

References:

Google Cloud IAM Documentation

Google Cloud Resource Manager Documentation

Scenarios for exporting Cloud Logging data: Splunk This scenario shows how to export selected logs from Cloud Logging to Pub/Sub for ingestion into Splunk. Splunk is a security information and event management (SIEM) solution that supports several ways of ingesting data, such as receiving streaming data out of Google Cloud through Splunk HTTP Event Collector (HEC) or by fetching data from Google Cloud APIs through Splunk Add-on for Google Cloud. Using the Pub/Sub to Splunk Dataflow template, you can natively forward logs and events from a Pub/Sub topic into Splunk HEC. If Splunk HEC is not available in your Splunk deployment, you can use the Add-on to collect the logs and events from the Pub/Sub topic. https://cloud.google.com/solutions/exporting-stackdriver-logging-for-splunk

https://cloud.google.com/identity/solutions/automate-user-provisioning#cloud_identity_automated_provisioning

"Cloud Identity has a catalog of automated provisioning connectors, which act as a bridge between Cloud Identity and third-party cloud apps."

Uniform bucket-level access allows you to manage permissions at the bucket level, rather than at the object level. This simplifies permission management and ensures that access to objects is controlled consistently via IAM roles, without allowing uploaders full control over the objects.

Steps:

Enable Uniform Bucket-Level Access: In the Google Cloud Console, enable uniform bucket-level access for the Cloud Storage bucket.

Configure IAM Policies: Assign appropriate IAM roles to users and groups to control access to the bucket.

Audit Logging: Enable Cloud Audit Logs to track access and modifications to the bucket.

References:

Google Cloud: Uniform bucket-level access

Managing access with IAM

https://cloud.google.co m/load-balancing/docs/tcp

TCP Proxy Load Balancing is implemented on GFEs that are distributed globally. If you choose the Premium Tier of Network Service Tiers, a TCP proxy load balancer is global. In Premium Tier, you can deploy backends in multiple regions, and the load balancer automatically directs user traffic to the closest region that has capacity. If you choose the Standard Tier, a TCP proxy load balancer can only direct traffic among backends in a single region. https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/load-balancing-overview#tcp-proxy-load-balancing

Google Cloud Armor helps to protect applications from DDoS attacks and web application firewall (WAF) threats like XSS and SQLi. To use Google Cloud Armor security policies, certain requirements must be met:

External Load Balancers: Google Cloud Armor is specifically designed to work with external HTTP(S) load balancers, which handle traffic at the edge of the Google Cloud network. This type of load balancer provides a global frontend that can distribute traffic to various backends.

Load Balancing Scheme: The backend service associated with the Google Cloud Armor policy must have an EXTERNAL load balancing scheme. This scheme allows the service to accept traffic from outside the Google Cloud network, which is necessary for applying security policies effectively at the network edge.

These requirements ensure that Google Cloud Armor can inspect and filter incoming traffic before it reaches your web application's backend services, providing an additional layer of security against common web vulnerabilities.

References

Google Cloud Armor Documentation

External HTTP(S) Load Balancing Overview

Assured Workloads for Google Cloud allows you to deploy regulated workloads with data residency, access, and support requirements. It helps you configure your environment in a manner that aligns with specific compliance frameworks and standards.

"In order to be able to keep using the existing identity management system, identities need to be synchronized between AD and GCP IAM. To do so google provides a tool called Cloud Directory Sync. This tool will read all identities in AD and replicate those within GCP. Once the identities have been replicated then it's possible to apply IAM permissions on the groups. After that you will configure SAML so google can act as a service provider and either you ADFS or other third party tools like Ping or Okta will act as the identity provider. This way you effectively delegate the authentication from Google to something that is under your control."

To grant an IAM user access to HTTPS resources protected by Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP), you should assign the IAP-Secured Web App User role.

IAP-Secured Web App User (C):

This role grants the necessary permissions for a user to access web applications secured by IAP. It includes permissions to access the IAP-secured resources, ensuring that users can authenticate and gain the appropriate access based on the policies defined in IAP.

Assigning this role ensures that users have the right level of access to protected web resources, aligned with the security controls enforced by IAP.

References

Identity-Aware Proxy Documentation

IAP Roles and Permissions

Enable Firewall Rules Logging on the latest rules that were changed. Use Logs Explorer to analyze whether the rules are working correctly:

Enable Firewall Rules Logging for the specific firewall rules in question through the Google Cloud Console.

Once logging is enabled, use Logs Explorer to filter and review the firewall logs.

Analyze the logs to determine if the rules are allowing or blocking traffic as intended, identifying any misconfigurations or issues.

References:

Firewall Rules Logging

Using Logs Explorer

”This encryption method is reversible, which helps to maintain referential integrity across your database and has no character-set limitations.” https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/take-charge-of-your-data-how-tokenization-makes-data-usable-without-sacrificing-privacy

https://cloud.google.com/dlp/docs/pseudonymization

FPE provides fewer security guarantees compared to other deterministic encryption methods such as AES-SIV. For these reasons, Google strongly recommends using deterministic encryption with AES-SIV instead of FPE for all security sensitive use cases. Other methods like deterministic encryption using AES-SIV provide these stronger security guarantees and are recommended for tokenization use cases unless length and character set preservation are strict requirements—for example, for backward compatibility with a legacy data system.

Enable VPC Service Controls:

VPC Service Controls help mitigate the risk of data exfiltration by allowing you to define a security perimeter around GCP resources.

Set up a service perimeter around your BigQuery project to restrict data access to within the defined perimeter.

Create Access Levels:

In the Google Cloud Console, navigate to the Access Context Manager.

Define access levels based on IP address conditions, specifying the authorized source IP addresses that are allowed to access your BigQuery resources.

These access levels are used to enforce policies that restrict who can access your sensitive data based on their IP addresses.

Apply Service Perimeter with Access Levels:

Apply the created access levels to the service perimeter to ensure that only requests originating from the specified IP addresses are able to access BigQuery tables.

This setup ensures that the sensitive PII data is not accessible from unauthorized IP addresses, reducing the risk of data exfiltration.

References:

VPC Service Controls

Access Context Manager

Defining Access Levels

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql/cmek

"You might have situations where you want to permanently destroy data encrypted with CMEK. To do this, you destroy the customer-managed encryption key version. You can't destroy the keyring or key, but you can destroy key versions of the key."

To handle significant traffic spikes and potentially malicious IPs, you can use Google Cloud Armor to configure rate-based bans. This approach allows you to automatically ban clients that exceed a predefined request rate, protecting your application from potential denial-of-service attacks.

Access Google Cloud Console: Log in to your Google Cloud Console.

Navigate to Google Cloud Armor: Go to the "Security" section and select "Google Cloud Armor".

Create Security Policy: Create a new security policy or edit an existing one. Add a new rule to the policy.

Configure Rate-Based Ban: Set the action to rate_based_ban. Define the rate limit (e.g., requests per second) and set the ban_duration_sec parameter to the desired time interval.

Apply the Policy: Apply the security policy to your backend service or load balancer.

Monitor and Adjust: Monitor the traffic patterns and adjust the rate limits and ban durations as necessary to balance security and availability.

References:

Google Cloud Armor Documentation

Rate Limiting with Cloud Armor

To manage user accounts and ensure they comply with corporate policies, using Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS) allows synchronization between your local identity system and Cloud Identity. The Transfer Tool for Unmanaged Users (TTUU) helps identify and manage conflicting accounts by allowing users to transfer their personal accounts to managed accounts.

Steps:

Synchronize Identities: Use GCDS to sync users from your local identity management system to Cloud Identity, ensuring that all corporate user accounts are managed.

Identify Conflicting Accounts: Use TTUU to find users who have personal Google accounts using corporate email addresses.

Manage Conflicting Accounts: Request users to transfer their personal accounts to managed accounts using TTUU, ensuring all accounts are under corporate control.

References:

Google Cloud Directory Sync

Transfer Tool for Unmanaged Users

To enable Engineering Group A to attach a Compute Engine instance to a specific subnet (10.1.1.0/24) in a Shared VPC, you should grant the Compute Network User Role at the subnet level. This role allows users to use the subnetwork for their instances without giving them broader permissions at the project level.

Step-by-Step:

Identify the Subnet: Locate the subnet (10.1.1.0/24) in the host project.

Grant Role:

Navigate to the GCP Console > VPC network > VPC networks.

Select the Shared VPC host project and locate the specific subnet.

Click on "Edit" and go to the "IAM & Admin" section.

Assign the "Compute Network User" role to Engineering Group A at the subnet level.

Verification: Ensure that Engineering Group A can now attach Compute Engine instances to the specified subnet.

References:

Shared VPC Overview

Compute Network User Role

Objective: Prevent users from creating projects while allowing only the DevOps team to create projects.

Solution: Modify IAM roles and permissions.

Steps:

Step 1: Open the Google Cloud Console.

Step 2: Navigate to the IAM & Admin page.

Step 3: At the organizational level, find and remove all users from the Project Creator role.

Step 4: Create or identify a group for the DevOps team.

Step 5: Assign the Project Creator role to the DevOps team group at the organizational level.

By removing all users from the Project Creator role and granting it only to the DevOps team, you ensure that only the designated team can create projects.

References:

GCP IAM Documentation

Project Creator Role

This option directly addresses the needs of the business user who must access curated reports. By creating curated tables in a separate dataset, you can control access to specific data. Assigning the roles/bigquery.dataViewer role allows the business user to view the data in BigQuery.

The Resource Location Restriction organization policy constraint ensures that business data is stored in specific geographic locations, which is critical for compliance with regulatory requirements.

Organization Level: Setting the constraint at the organization level ensures that all resources within the organization, including those in different folders or projects, adhere to the location restrictions. This provides a unified policy application across the entire organization, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Policy Application: The policy will propagate down the resource hierarchy, ensuring that all relevant services within the organization comply with the specified data residency requirements.

This approach provides centralized control and simplifies the management of data residency constraints.

References

Organization Policy Service Documentation

Set up a Dedicated Interconnect link between the on-premises environment and Google Cloud:

Dedicated Interconnect provides a direct physical connection between your on-premises network and Google's network, which is ideal for high-throughput, low-latency connections.

Request a Dedicated Interconnect from the Google Cloud Console, specifying the required bandwidth and location.

Once provisioned, set up the connection on your on-premises router and configure the BGP sessions to exchange routes with Google Cloud.

Configure private access using the restricted.googleapis.com domains in on-premises DNS configurations:

Configure your on-premises DNS server to resolve Google APIs to restricted.googleapis.com. This ensures that the traffic stays within the Google network and is not exposed to the public internet.

Update your DNS settings to use restricted.googleapis.com for the necessary API endpoints.

This setup ensures that all Google Cloud API traffic is routed through the private link and subject to VPC Service Controls for additional security and compliance.

References:

Dedicated Interconnect Overview

Configuring DNS to use restricted.googleapis.com

https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/organization-policy/org-policy-constraints - constraints/compute.trustedImageProjects

This list constraint defines the set of projects that can be used for image storage and disk instantiation for Compute Engine. If this constraint is active, only images from trusted projects will be allowed as the source for boot disks for new instances.

The minimum length for passwords in Cloud Identity can be set to 8 characters. This aligns with common security best practices for password policies, ensuring a basic level of complexity and security.

Step-by-Step:

Access Admin Console: Log in to the Google Admin console.

Navigate to Security Settings: Go to Security > Password Management.

Set Minimum Length: Set the minimum length for passwords to 8 characters.

Save Changes: Save the settings and ensure that all user accounts adhere to the new policy.

References:

Google Cloud Identity Security Settings

Password Policy Best Practices

To ensure that application teams can only add users from within your organization to their groups, you need to configure the group settings in the Google Workspace Admin console. Here are the steps:

Access Google Workspace Admin Console:

Go to the Google Workspace Admin console.

Navigate to the Groups section.

Configure Group Settings:

Select the relevant groups used by the application teams.

Go to the group settings and set the group to only allow members from your domain.

This prevents external users from being added to these groups.

Apply and Save Changes:

Apply the changes to ensure that only users from within your organization can be added to these groups.

Verify Configuration:

Test the configuration by attempting to add an external user to the group and verifying that it is not allowed.

Benefits:

Security: Prevents unauthorized access by ensuring that only internal users can be added to groups.

Compliance: Helps in adhering to organizational policies regarding user access and management.

References

Google Workspace Admin Help: Groups

Rotating a user-managed Service Account key involves creating a new key, updating your application to use the new key, and then deleting the old key to maintain security. Here’s the step-by-step process:

Create a New Key: Use the Google Cloud Console or gcloud command-line tool to create a new key for the service account. This generates a new key pair and provides you with the private key.

gcloud iam service-accounts keys create new-key-file.json --iam-account=YOUR_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL

Update Application: Update your application configuration to use the new key. This might involve replacing the old key file with the new one or updating the environment variables or configurations that point to the key file.

Delete the Old Key: Once you have confirmed that the application is working correctly with the new key, delete the old key from the service account to ensure it cannot be used for unauthorized access.

gcloud iam service-accounts keys delete OLD_KEY_ID --iam-account=YOUR_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL

This process ensures that your service account keys are regularly rotated, reducing the risk of key compromise.

References

Managing Service Account Keys

Service Account Key Rotation

If the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is set, ADC uses the service account key or configuration file that the variable points to. If the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS isn't set, ADC uses the service account that is attached to the resource that is running your code. https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/production#passing_the_path_to_the_service_account_key_in_code

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/aggregated_sinks#supported-destinations

You can use aggregated sinks to route logs within or between the same organizations and folders to the following destinations: - Another Cloud Logging bucket: Log entries held in Cloud Logging log buckets.

https://cloud.google.com/network-intelligence-center/docs/firewall-insights/concepts/overview#shadowed-firewall-rules

Firewall Insights analyzes your firewall rules to detect firewall rules that are shadowed by other rules. A shadowed rule is a firewall rule that has all of its relevant attributes, such as its IP address and port ranges, overlapped by attributes from one or more rules with higher or equal priority, called shadowing rules.

Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) allows you to control access to your web applications running on Google Cloud. It ensures that only authenticated users who are part of a specified Google Group can access the application. Here’s how you can restrict access to in-progress sites using IAP:

Enable IAP: First, you need to enable Cloud IAP for your App Engine application. This will require configuring OAuth consent and setting up necessary permissions.

Create a Google Group: Create a Google Group that includes all the customers and company employees who should have access to the in-progress sites.

Configure Access: Configure IAP to allow access only to members of the created Google Group. This involves setting up the necessary IAP policies and ensuring that only authenticated users in the group can access the application.

By using IAP, you ensure that the access control is centrally managed and only authorized users can view the in-progress sites from any location.

References

Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy Documentation

Setting up IAP

Requirement:

Enforce the use of Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) for all new Cloud Storage resources in the organization.

Policy Constraint:

Use the constraints/gcp.restrictNonCmekServices constraint to enforce CMEK usage.

Policy Type and Value:

Set the policy type to allow to specify which services must use CMEK.

In this case, the policy value should be storage.googleapis.com to target Cloud Storage.

Command:

Applying the organization policy with the appropriate binding ensures that all new Cloud Storage resources under the organization will require CMEK.

Steps:

Step 1: Go to the Google Cloud Console.

Step 2: Navigate to the Organization Policies page.

Step 3: Apply the policy constraint constraints/gcp.restrictNonCmekServices with the allow policy type and storage.googleapis.com as the policy value.

References:

Organization Policy Constraints

Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK)

Objective: Implement an encryption at-rest strategy that balances key management complexity and control for sensitive and non-sensitive data, ensuring FIPS 140-2 L1 compliance.

Solution: Use Google default encryption for non-sensitive data and Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) for sensitive data.

Steps:

Step 1: Store non-sensitive data using Google Cloud’s default encryption, which automatically encrypts data at rest without additional configuration.

Step 2: For sensitive data, use Cloud KMS to create and manage encryption keys.

Step 3: Configure key rotation policies for the keys managed by Cloud KMS to meet compliance requirements.

Step 4: Ensure that all data encryption keys used by Cloud KMS comply with FIPS 140-2 Level 1 standards.

By using Google default encryption for non-sensitive data and Cloud KMS for sensitive data, you can manage encryption efficiently while maintaining control over key residency and rotation for sensitive data.

References:

Google Cloud Default Encryption

Cloud Key Management Service

FIPS 140-2 Compliance

Pseudonymization is a de-identification technique that replaces sensitive data values with cryptographically generated tokens. Pseudonymization is widely used in industries like finance and healthcare to help reduce the risk of data in use, narrow compliance scope, and minimize the exposure of sensitive data to systems while preserving data utility and accuracy.

https://cloud.google.com/dlp/docs/pseudonymization

To ensure that the developers can view audit logs for the development environment and the security team can review all logs, you should grant IAM roles at the appropriate resource levels:

Grant logging.admin Role to the Security Team:

Assign the logging.admin role to the security team at the organization resource level.

This grants the security team full access to all logging data across the organization, including both production and development environments.

Grant logging.viewer Role to the Developer Team:

Assign the logging.viewer role to the developer team at the folder resource level that contains all the development projects.

This restricts the developers' access to only view logs in the development environment, ensuring they do not have access to production logs.

By using these roles and assigning them at the appropriate levels, you ensure that each team has the access they need while adhering to the principle of least privilege.

References:

IAM Roles for Cloud Logging

Resource Hierarchy in Google Cloud

For a client concerned about the control of their encryption keys and not wanting to store these keys within the same cloud service provider (CSP) as the data, the following solutions are suitable:

Customer-supplied encryption keys (A):

With customer-supplied encryption keys, clients manage their own encryption keys outside of Google Cloud and supply them to encrypt and decrypt data. This ensures that the keys are not stored in Google Cloud, providing full control over the key management process.

Cloud External Key Manager (D):

Cloud External Key Manager (EKM) allows clients to integrate an external key management system (KMS) with Google Cloud services. This setup enables the client to keep their encryption keys outside Google Cloud while still allowing the data to be encrypted and decrypted within Google Cloud services. This method offers an additional layer of security and control over the encryption keys.

These options provide robust solutions for clients requiring external key management and enhanced control over their encryption processes.

References

Customer-Supplied Encryption Keys

Cloud External Key Manager

Use Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions to trigger a Cloud Data Loss Prevention scan every time a file is uploaded to the administrator's bucket. If the scan does not detect PII, have the function move the objects into the shared Cloud Storage bucket:

Configure a Pub/Sub topic to publish notifications when new files are uploaded to the administrator's bucket.

Create a Cloud Function that is triggered by the Pub/Sub topic. This function uses the Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API to scan the uploaded files for PII.

If the scan does not detect PII, the function moves the file to the shared Cloud Storage bucket. This ensures that only non-sensitive data is accessible to analysts, while PII remains secure in the administrator's bucket.

References:

Using Pub/Sub with Cloud Functions

Cloud Data Loss Prevention API

Review Admin Activity logs:

Admin Activity logs contain entries for API calls that modify or read the configuration or metadata of resources.

These logs are useful for monitoring and auditing administrative actions, including those that could indicate malicious activity on a Cloud SQL instance.

References:

Audit Logs: Admin Activity

To minimize the usage of service account keys and implement Workload Identity Federation (WIF) with your on-premises identity provider, you can use a workload identity pool integrated with your corporate Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS). This setup allows your on-premises Windows-based applications to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs without using long-lived service account keys.

Set Up a Workload Identity Pool:

In the Google Cloud Console, go to IAM & Admin > Workload Identity Federation.

Create a new workload identity pool.

Configure the pool to trust your corporate ADFS by specifying the federation provider details.

Create a Workload Identity Provider:

Within the created pool, set up a new provider for ADFS.

Configure the provider with the necessary details such as the issuer URL and credentials.

Configure Impersonation Rules:

Set up rules to allow principals in the workload identity pool to impersonate specific Google Cloud service accounts.

This is done by specifying the identity provider and the conditions under which the service accounts can be impersonated.

Update Applications:

Modify your on-premises applications to use the configured ADFS authentication to obtain tokens.

These tokens can then be exchanged for Google Cloud access tokens to interact with Google Cloud APIs securely.

By setting up the workload identity pool and configuring impersonation rules, you achieve secure authentication without needing to distribute and manage service account keys.

References:

Workload Identity Federation Documentation

Federating On-Premises Identities to Workload Identity Federation

Objective: Migrate ongoing data backup and disaster recovery solutions to GCP.

Solution: Use Cloud Storage with scheduled tasks and gsutil.

Steps:

Step 1: Set up a Cloud Interconnect to ensure stable networking connectivity between the on-premises environment and GCP.

Step 2: Create a Cloud Storage bucket to store backups.

Step 3: Use gsutil, a command-line tool for Cloud Storage, to create scripts for data transfer.

Step 4: Schedule these scripts using cron jobs or another scheduling tool to automate the backup process.

Using Cloud Storage with scheduled tasks and gsutil ensures efficient and reliable backup and disaster recovery while leveraging stable connectivity provided by Cloud Interconnect.

References:

Cloud Storage Documentation

gsutil Tool Documentation

Cloud Interconnect Documentation

Firewall Rule Analysis: Analyze the existing VPC firewall rules to identify any rules that might allow traffic between VM instances based on the same service account.

Priority Check: Check the priority of these rules. A rule with a priority lower than 1000 (such as 999) will take precedence over your tag-based rules.

Service Account Configuration: Since your VM instances are deployed without any service account customization, they are likely using the default service account. A firewall rule allowing traffic between instances using this default service account will override the tag-based rules if it has a higher priority.

Testing and Validation: Disable or adjust the priority of the rule with priority 999 to test if the tag-based segmentation works correctly. Validate that the traffic is segmented according to your intended configuration. References:

Google Cloud - VPC Firewall Rules

Google Cloud - Service Accounts

With Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS), you can synchronize the data in your Google Account with your Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP server. GCDS doesn't migrate any content (such as email messages, calendar events, or files) to your Google Account. You use GCDS to synchronize your Google users, groups, and shared contacts to match the information in your LDAP server.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/106368?hl=en

Use the org policy constraint "Google Cloud Platform - Resource Location Restriction" on your Google Cloud organization node: This organizational policy constraint allows you to restrict the locations where your resources can be created. By setting this constraint to allow only Europe regions, you can ensure compliance with GDPR and other regional regulations.

Implementation: To implement this, you need to configure the organization policy with the constraint constraints/gcp.resourceLocations. You can specify allowed regions such as europe-west1 and europe-west4 to ensure resources are only created in these locations.

References

Resource Location Restriction documentation

GDPR compliance on Google Cloud