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

Challenge:

Ensuring secure access to Google Cloud resources from GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines without directly managing service account keys.

Workload Identity Federation:

Allows for the delegation of access to Google Cloud resources based on federated identities, such as those from GitHub.

Benefits:

This approach eliminates the need to manage service account keys, reducing the risk of key leakage.

It leverages GitHub's identity provider capabilities to authenticate and authorize access.

Steps to Configure Workload Identity Federation:

Step 1: Create a workload identity pool in Google Cloud.

Step 2: Add GitHub as an identity provider within the pool.

Step 3: Configure the necessary permissions and bindings for the identity pool to allow GitHub Actions to access Google Cloud resources.

Step 4: Update the GitHub Actions workflow to use the identity federation for authentication.

Objective: Ensure that a Cloud Storage bucket in Project A can only be readable from Project B and prevent data access or copying to Cloud Storage buckets outside the network, even with correct credentials.

Solution: Use VPC Service Controls to create a security perimeter.

Steps:

Step 1: Open the Google Cloud Console.

Step 2: Navigate to the VPC Service Controls page.

Step 3: Create a new service perimeter.

Step 4: Add Project A and Project B to the service perimeter.

Step 5: Include Cloud Storage service in the perimeter configuration.

Step 6: Define access levels to ensure that only resources within the perimeter can access the Cloud Storage bucket.

By setting up a VPC Service Controls perimeter, you can enforce security boundaries that restrict data access and movement to within defined projects, providing an extra layer of protection beyond IAM permissions.

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.

When using Google Cloud's generative AI platforms like Vertex AI for model tuning, the contractual and technical safeguards are designed to protect customer data from being used for public model training.

Google's policy is that the content (data) uploaded for model tuning is used only for that specific, express purpose (tuning your model) and is not used to tune Google's foundational public models or shared with other customers.

Extracts:

"Google only uses content that you import or upload to our model tuning feature for that express purpose." (Source 6.1)

"Tuning content may be retained in connection with your tuned models for purposes of re-tuning when supported models change. When you delete a tuned model, the related tuning content is also deleted." (Source 6.1)

Therefore, based on the documented commitment for Vertex AI model tuning, no additional action is required (Do nothing) to prevent Google from using the data for general model tuning.

The problem states that Google Cloud applications need to access external web services and requires the ability to monitor, control, and log this access.

Monitoring, Controlling, and Logging external web access: This specifically points to a proxy solution, which can intercept, inspect, and log HTTP/S traffic.

Secure Web Proxy (SWP): Google Cloud's Secure Web Proxy is designed for exactly this use case. It acts as an explicit forward proxy for HTTP(S) traffic, allowing organizations to implement granular access controls, inspect traffic for security threats, and log all outbound web requests from their Google Cloud environment.Extract Reference: "Secure Web Proxy is a managed service that lets you deploy and manage an explicit forward proxy to protect your organization's internal resources from web-based threats and to control access to external web applications." and "With Secure Web Proxy, you can: Enforce granular access policies based on different attributes, Log all HTTP(S) requests that are handled by the proxy, and Monitor web traffic for threats." (Google Cloud documentation: https://cloud.google.com/secure-web-proxy)

Let's evaluate the other options:

A. Configure VPC firewall rules to allow the services to access the IP addresses of required external web services: VPC firewall rules operate at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and Layer 3 (IP). While they can allow or deny traffic to specific IP addresses and ports, they cannot monitor, control, or log HTTP/S requests at the application layer. They don't provide granular control over which web services are accessed or inspect the content of the requests.

C. Configure Google Cloud Armor to monitor and protect your applications by checking incoming traffic patterns for attack patterns: Google Cloud Armor is primarily a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection and Web Application Firewall (WAF) service. It focuses on protecting applications from incoming threats (ingress traffic), not controlling and logging outgoing access to external web services.

D. Set up a Cloud NAT instance to allow egress traffic from your VPC: Cloud NAT allows instances without external IP addresses to connect to the internet. While it enables egress, it does not provide monitoring, control, or logging capabilities for specific web services at the application layer. It's a network address translation service, not an application-layer proxy.

Therefore, setting up a Secure Web Proxy is the most appropriate solution to meet the requirements of monitoring, controlling, and logging access to external web services from Google Cloud applications.

Objective: Identify the layers of the stack the customer shares responsibility for in a shared security responsibility model for IaaS.

Solution: Understand the shared responsibility model.

Network Security: Customers are responsible for configuring network security, such as setting up firewalls, managing VPCs, and ensuring secure network traffic.

Access Policies: Customers are responsible for managing access policies, including IAM roles and permissions, to ensure only authorized users can access resources.

In IaaS, the cloud provider is typically responsible for the underlying infrastructure, while the customer is responsible for securing their applications and data on the cloud.

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

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.

To provide temporary write access to a Cloud Storage bucket with the minimum permissions necessary, you should:

Identify the Compute Engine instance’s default service account: Each Compute Engine instance has a default service account that is used to interact with other Google Cloud services.

Assign the storage.objectCreator role: This predefined IAM role grants permissions to create objects in a Cloud Storage bucket, which is sufficient for temporary write access. It does not grant permissions to read or delete objects, thus adhering to the principle of least privilege.

Avoid using full permissions or long-lived keys: Options A and C suggest using broader permissions than necessary or embedding long-lived keys, which could pose a security risk if compromised.

Service account impersonation (Option D) is not necessary for this task and would be more appropriate for scenarios where you need to assume a different identity with different permissions.

To prepare for migrating Google Cloud projects to a new organization node, it's crucial to ensure that the projects' current configurations and dependencies are appropriately managed. The two necessary preparation steps are:

Identify inherited Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles on projects to be migrated (C):

Projects inherit IAM roles from their parent resources. Identifying these roles is essential to understand the permissions and access levels that users have on the projects. This will help in ensuring that after migration, the appropriate roles and permissions are applied correctly.

Remove the specific migration projects from any VPC Service Controls perimeters and bridges (E):

VPC Service Controls provide security boundaries around your Google Cloud resources to mitigate data exfiltration risks. Before migrating the projects, they need to be removed from any existing VPC Service Controls perimeters and bridges to prevent any disruption in access or network communication. After migration, the projects can be added back to the necessary perimeters.

References

Google Cloud IAM documentation

VPC Service Controls documentation