Pass the Google Google Cloud Certified Professional-Cloud-Security-Engineer Questions and answers with CertsForce

If you want to manage the key encryption keys used for your data at rest, instead of having Google manage the keys, use Cloud Key Management Service to manage your keys. This scenario is known as customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/encryption-at-rest

To configure the behavior where each department member automatically has read-only access to all new project resources created by any department member, you should use Google Cloud's folder structure and IAM roles effectively. Here are the steps:

Create Folders for Departments: Create a folder under your Organization for each department. Folders help organize resources and provide a hierarchy for applying policies and permissions.

Assign IAM Roles to Google Groups: Assign the Project Viewer role to the Google Group associated with each department at the folder level. This ensures that all members of the group have the necessary permissions.

Inherited Permissions: When a department member creates a new project under their department's folder, the permissions assigned to the folder are inherited by the new project. Thus, all department members will automatically have read-only access to the project's resources.

Navigate to IAM & Admin in the GCP Console.

Select "Folders" from the left-hand menu.

For each department, create a new folder under the organization.

Select the newly created folder, and then go to the "Permissions" tab.

Click on "Add" to assign a new role.

Enter the email address of the Google Group for the department.

Assign the "Project Viewer" role to the group.

Access Restrictions: Since the permissions are applied at the folder level, only the members of the specific department's Google Group will have read-only access to the projects created in that folder. Other departments will not have access unless explicitly granted.

By following these steps, you ensure that department members have the required access to their respective projects without manual configuration for each new project.

Google Cloud IAM Documentation

Google Cloud Resource Manager Documentation

"Isolate VMs using service accounts when possible" "even though it is possible to uses tags for target filtering in this manner, we recommend that you use service accounts where possible. Target tags are not access-controlled and can be changed by someone with the instanceAdmin role while VMs are in service. Service accounts are access-controlled, meaning that a specific user must be explicitly authorized to use a service account. There can only be one service account per instance, whereas there can be multiple tags. Also, service accounts assigned to a VM can only be changed when the VM is stopped." https://cloud.google.com/solutions/best-practices-vpc-design#isolate-vms-service-accounts

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

Titan Security Keys are a physical form of two-step verification (2SV) that provide the highest level of account security by using cryptographic signatures to verify the user and the URL of the login page.

Cryptographic Security: Titan Security Keys use a hardware-based cryptographic method to authenticate users, which is resistant to phishing attacks. This ensures that the authentication process is secure and not susceptible to being intercepted or spoofed.

URL Verification: Titan Security Keys verify the URL of the login page during the authentication process, providing an additional layer of security against phishing attempts that may try to redirect users to malicious websites.

Ease of Use: These keys are easy to use and integrate with Google's 2SV process, providing a seamless and highly secure authentication method for users.

References

Titan Security Keys

The problem requires granting an external partner team access solely to a database, without extending to other network resources, and following Google-recommended practices.

Workforce Identity Federation: This Google Cloud IAM feature is specifically designed for scenarios where an organization needs to grant Google Cloud access to external identities (like partners, contractors, or customers) who are managed by their own identity provider (IdP). It allows these external users to authenticate using their existing credentials and then gain access to specified Google Cloud resources.

Extract Reference: "Workforce Identity Federation lets you use an external identity provider (IdP) to authenticate and authorize a workforce—a group of users, such as employees, partners, and contractors—using IAM, so that the users can access Google Cloud services." (Google Cloud Documentation: "Workforce Identity Federation | IAM Documentation" - https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/workforce-identity-federation)

Extract Reference: "Secure access for partners and vendors. Workforce Identity Federation can enable enterprises to selectively federate users from partner or vendor IdPs without requiring IT teams to sync or create a separate identity store to use Google Cloud resources." (Google Cloud Documentation: "Introducing Workforce Identity Federation..." - https://www.azalio.io/introducing-workforce-identity-federation-to-easily-manage-workforce-access-to-google-cloud/)

Least Privilege and Isolation: With Workforce Identity Federation, you create an identity pool and a provider that trusts the partner's IdP. You then grant IAM roles only to the workforce pool (or specific identities within it) on the specific database resource. This ensures fine-grained access control and prevents access to other resources in your network, directly addressing the least privilege and isolation requirements. The partner's identities are never synced into your internal Cloud Identity directory.

Let's evaluate the other options:

A. Add a public IP address... Securely distribute credentials: Adding a public IP address exposes the database to the internet, which is a major security risk and contradicts "restricted solely to the database and can not extend to any other resources within your company's network" as it allows any external network to potentially reach it. Distributing credentials manually is also not a Google-recommended secure practice.

B. Create accounts for the partner team in your corporate identity provider. Synchronize these accounts with Google Cloud Identity: This means you become responsible for managing the partner's identities within your own corporate IdP and syncing them. This is an unnecessary operational burden and blurs the lines of identity management. It also may inadvertently grant them broader network access if your corporate IdP is connected to your internal network resources.

C. Ask the partner team to set up Cloud Identity accounts within their own corporate environment and identity provider. Grant the partner’s Cloud Identity accounts access: While better than B, this implies the partner managing Cloud Identity accounts themselves and you directly granting IAM roles to their Cloud Identity users. Workforce Identity Federation is a more robust and scalable solution for federating any external IdP with Google Cloud IAM, rather than requiring partners to adopt Cloud Identity directly. Workforce Identity Federation is the explicit pattern for cross-organization access using existing external IdPs.

Therefore, Workforce Identity Federation is the most secure, scalable, and Google-recommended solution for granting restricted access to external partner teams.

This is a Customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK). We generate our own encryption key and manage it on-premises. A KEK never leaves Cloud KMS.There is no KEK or KMS on-premises. Encryption at rest by default, with various key management options https://cloud.google.com/security/encryption-at-rest

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/billing-access#overview-of-cloud-billing-roles-in-cloud-iam

Billing Account Costs Manager (roles/billing.costsManager)

- Manage budgets and view and export cost information of billing accounts (but not pricing information)

Billing Account Viewer (roles/billing.viewer)

- View billing account cost information and transactions.

Objective: Encrypt data using envelope encryption.

Solution: Follow the envelope encryption process.

Steps:

Step 1: Generate a Data Encryption Key (DEK) locally. The DEK is used to encrypt the actual data.

Step 2: Encrypt the data using the DEK.

Step 3: Use a Key Encryption Key (KEK) to wrap the DEK. The KEK is used to encrypt the DEK.

Step 4: Store the encrypted data and the wrapped DEK. This ensures that the data can be securely decrypted in the future using the KEK to unwrap the DEK.

Envelope encryption enhances security by adding an additional layer of encryption to the data encryption key, which is particularly useful for managing large volumes of encrypted data.