Google Professional-Cloud-Security-Engineer - Google Cloud Certified - Professional Cloud Security Engineer

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.

Google Cloud Load Balancing Documentation

Setting up HTTPS Load Balancing

Cloud NAT (Network Address Translation) enables instances in a private network to connect to external services while not exposing their internal IP addresses to the public internet. This solution helps in situations where VMs need to initiate outbound connections without having a public IP address:

Cloud NAT Setup: Configure Cloud NAT for the subnet where your VMs are located. This allows these VMs to use the NAT gateway to communicate with external services securely.

Network Security: By using Cloud NAT, the internal IP addresses of VMs remain private, reducing the attack surface and enhancing security.

Operational Continuity: VMs can continue to communicate with external sites as needed for operations without requiring public IP addresses, meeting both security and functional requirements.

References

Cloud NAT Documentation

To mitigate the risk posed by long-running Google Cloud CLI sessions, it is essential to enforce a reauthentication frequency. This ensures that users must periodically reauthenticate, reducing the window of opportunity for an attacker to exploit an open session. Setting the reauthentication frequency to one hour forces users to reauthenticate after this period, thereby limiting the duration an attacker can use a compromised session.

Access Google Cloud Console: Log in to your Google Cloud Console using your admin credentials.

Navigate to Security Settings: Go to the "Security" section of the Cloud Console.

Set Session Control: Under the session management settings, locate the "Reauthentication frequency" setting. This controls how often users must reauthenticate.

Configure Reauthentication Frequency: Set the reauthentication frequency to "1 hour". This configuration will force users to reauthenticate every hour, thus limiting the duration of each session.

Save Changes: Confirm and save your changes. This setting will now apply to all users, ensuring that open sessions are minimized to a duration of one hour.

Set the Resource Location Restriction organization policy constraint at the Folder level:

Setting the constraint at the folder level allows for very granular control over data residency requirements.

Each folder can represent a specific geographical location, and projects within those folders will inherit the location constraint, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

This approach provides flexibility to manage data residency across different regions within the same 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.

To ensure servers do not have any direct communication with the public internet, they must be configured without a public IP address.

VPC and Private Subnet: A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network provides the isolated, internal network structure. A subnet is the logical partition within the VPC.

Private IP Address: Assigning only a private IP address to the database servers ensures they can only communicate internally within the VPC (or connected on-premises networks) and cannot directly connect to or be connected from the public internet.

Extracts:

"Resources in a VPC network can be assigned two types of IP addresses: internal (private) and external (public). If a VM is not assigned an external IP address, it can only communicate internally with other resources in the VPC network..." (Source 6.1)

Option A and C involve assigning a public IP address, which violates the "no direct communication with the public internet" rule. Option D uses NAT to provide outbound internet connectivity, which also violates the requirement.

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.

The requirement to ensure the master encryption key material never leaves the on-premises hardware (HSM) and retaining the unilateral ability to revoke access are the defining features of Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM).

Key Residency: Cloud EKM allows you to use encryption keys stored and managed in a supported external key management system, such as an on-premises HSM, for encrypting data in Google Cloud services like BigQuery and Cloud Storage. This ensures the key material remains in your accredited hardware.

Unilateral Control: Since Google Cloud must request the key from the external system for every encryption/decryption operation, revoking access (by disabling the key or revoking Google's access) in the external system immediately renders the data in Google Cloud inaccessible, granting the customer unilateral control.

Extracts:

"Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM) is a cloud service that lets you encrypt data in Google Cloud with keys you manage outside of Google Cloud." (Source 6.1)

"The key material is stored on an external system, such as a Cloud EKM partner or an on-premises HSM, and never leaves that system." (Source 6.1)

"The customer can unilaterally revoke access to the key at the EKM system, making the encrypted data in Google Cloud inaccessible, which is a key requirement for highly regulated industries." (Source 6.2)

To maintain a historical record of what was running in Google Cloud Platform at any point in time, you should use Forseti Security to automate inventory snapshots. Forseti Security is an open-source toolkit that helps to automate security and compliance in GCP by taking inventory snapshots of GCP resources.

Step-by-Step:

Install Forseti Security:

Follow the installation guide to deploy Forseti Security on your GCP environment.

Configure Inventory:

Set up the inventory module in Forseti to capture and store snapshots of GCP resources.

Schedule Snapshots:

Use Forseti’s configuration to schedule regular inventory snapshots.

Access Historical Data:

Review and access historical records through Forseti’s dashboard or by querying the Forseti database.

Compliance and Monitoring: Use Forseti to ensure compliance and monitor changes over time.

Forseti Security Overview

Inventory Module

The requirement is to establish a network security boundary around a specific service (BigQuery) for resources in a Folder, while allowing the team to manage that boundary. This is the definition of using VPC Service Controls (VPC SC) with scoped policies.

VPC Service Controls (VPC SC): Used to create a service perimeter (a security boundary) around BigQuery and other Google Cloud services, which restricts API access.

Scoped Policy on the Folder: This enforces the boundary exactly at the required Folder level, as opposed to the organization level.

Access Context Manager Editor Role: Access Context Manager is the service that manages VPC SC policies (Service Perimeters and Access Levels). Granting this role on the scoped policy allows the data analytics team to fulfill the requirement to "control the restrictions."

Extracts (Conceptual Basis for VPC SC and Scoped Policies):

"Private Service Connect provides... Explicit authorization. Private Service Connect provides an authorization model that gives consumers and producers granular control, ensuring that only the intended service endpoints and no other resources can connect to a service." (Source 2.4 - VPC SC and PSC share a core architectural concept of explicit, service-oriented boundaries)

Option B is the technical implementation that matches the requirements: using a VPC SC service perimeter (for service restriction) applied as a scoped policy on the folder (for resource hierarchy scope) with Access Context Manager Editor (for team management/control).