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

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.

To ensure compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) at the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) level within Google Cloud, it's essential to have continuous monitoring and assessment tools that can detect deviations from compliance requirements.​

Option A: Creating data profiles and configuring Data Discovery jobs in Google Cloud Sensitive Data Protection focuses on identifying and analyzing sensitive data but does not directly address infrastructure compliance monitoring.​

Option B: Downloading the latest PCI DSS report from the Compliance Reports Manager provides a static compliance report but does not offer real-time detection of deviations within your specific environment.​

Option C: Utilizing Assured Workloads helps in creating environments that meet specific compliance requirements, but migrating existing projects into such folders does not actively detect deviations; it primarily ensures that new workloads comply with predefined policies.​

Option D: Activating Security Command Center (SCC) Premium and leveraging its Compliance Monitoring capabilities allows for continuous assessment of your Google Cloud environment against PCI DSS requirements. SCC can identify misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance violations in real-time, providing actionable insights to address any issues promptly.​

Therefore, Option D is the most effective approach to detect deviations at the IaaS level in preparation for a PCI DSS audit.​

Enable automatic key version rotation on a regular schedule:

Regularly rotating keys reduces the impact of a potentially compromised key by limiting the amount of data encrypted with a single key version.

Set up automatic key rotation in Cloud KMS to ensure keys are rotated without manual intervention.

Limit the number of messages encrypted with each key version:

Reducing the number of messages encrypted with each key version minimizes the potential data exposure in case of a key compromise.

Implement policies to ensure that new key versions are used periodically to limit the usage of each key version.

To ensure end-user access is only allowed if the traffic originates from a specific known good CIDR and to utilize GCP's native SYN flood protection, you can use the following product:

VPC Firewall Rules: By configuring VPC firewall rules, you can control traffic to and from your instances based on IP address, protocol, and port. You can set rules to only allow traffic from a specific CIDR block, ensuring that only authorized traffic can reach your application.

Additionally, Google Cloud Platform provides built-in protections against SYN flood attacks, which are a type of DDoS attack. These protections are part of the underlying infrastructure and do not require additional configuration.

Using VPC firewall rules will help you comply with the internal requirement of allowing access only from a specific CIDR and provide the necessary SYN flood DDoS protection.

References

Google Cloud VPC Firewall Rules

Google Cloud DDoS Protection

The problem requires restricting admin access to Google Cloud APIs based on geographic location (Canada and Germany) and environment (development and production projects).

VPC Service Controls (VPC SC): VPC Service Controls is designed to create security perimeters around Google Cloud resources and services. Its primary purpose is to prevent data exfiltration and control access to Google Cloud APIs based on the context of the request, which includes the source IP address.

Extract Reference: "VPC Service Controls provides an extra layer of security defense for Google Cloud services that is independent of Identity and Access Management (IAM). While IAM enables granular identity-based access control, VPC Service Controls enables broader context-based perimeter security, including controlling data egress across the perimeter." (Google Cloud Documentation: "Overview of VPC Service Controls" - https://cloud.google.com/vpc-service-controls/docs/overview)

Service Perimeters for Environments: Creating dedicated perimeters for development and production projects allows for logical separation of environments, which aligns with the "dedicated projects for development and production" structure.

Ingress Policies with Geographic Restrictions: VPC Service Controls uses "ingress rules" to define who and from where requests can enter a service perimeter. These ingress rules can be configured to allow access based on various attributes, including the source IP address of the request. By allowing access from specific IP ranges corresponding to Canada and Germany, you effectively restrict administrative access to APIs from those countries. You can define "access levels" (which can include IP subnets or geographical origins) and attach them to ingress policies.

Extract Reference: "To allow ingress to resources, VPC Service Controls evaluates sources and identityType attributes as an AND condition... You must specify an accessLevel or a resource (Google Cloud project or VPC network), or set accessLevel attribute to *." (Google Cloud Documentation: "Ingress and egress rules | VPC Service Controls" - https://cloud.google.com/vpc-service-controls/docs/ingress-egress-rules)

Extract Reference (for Context-Aware Access which underpins access levels): "You can create different types of Context-Aware Access policies for accessing apps: IP, device, geographic origin, and custom access-level attributes." (Google Workspace Admin Help: "Protect your business with Context-Aware Access" - https://support.google.com/a/answer/9275380) - While this references Workspace apps, the underlying mechanism of Access Context Manager (used by VPC SC) supports geographic restrictions.

Let's evaluate the other options:

A. Create dedicated firewall policies... restrict access based on geolocations: VPC firewall rules operate at the network level (Layers 3/4) within a VPC. They control traffic between VM instances or to/from the internet for network services. They do not directly control admin access to Google Cloud APIs (e.g., via the console or gcloud CLI calls) originating from outside the VPC.

B. Activate the organization policy on the folders to restrict resource location: The Resource Location Restriction organization policy constraint restricts where new resources can be created or stored (e.g., data residency requirements). It does not restrict where administrators can connect from to manage these resources or access APIs.

D. Create dedicated IAM Groups... Grant access: IAM (Identity and Access Management) controls who can access what resources and what actions they can perform. It does not natively provide control over where the access originates from (e.g., country-specific IP addresses).

Therefore, VPC Service Controls with properly configured ingress policies based on source IP/Access Levels is the recommended and most effective method for restricting admin access to Google Cloud APIs by geographic location and environment.

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 organize GCP projects based on different business units and manage IAM permissions, you should create an organization node and assign folders for each business unit. This approach allows you to logically separate projects under folders and apply IAM policies at the folder level.

Step-by-Step:

Create Organization Node: Ensure that your GCP account is linked to an organization.

Create Folders for Business Units:

Navigate to the GCP Console > IAM & Admin > Resource Manager.

Create a folder for each business unit under the organization node.

Move Projects to Folders:

Move existing projects into the respective folders according to the business unit.

Set IAM Policies:

Assign IAM roles and permissions at the folder level to manage access for each business unit independently.

Monitor and Manage: Use Cloud Audit Logs and other GCP tools to monitor the activities and ensure compliance with the organization’s policies.

Challenge:

Prevent common misconfigurations that expose services (e.g., MYSQL) to the public internet.

Hierarchical Firewall Policies:

These policies can be applied at the organization level to enforce consistent network security rules across all projects.

Solution:

Create a hierarchical firewall policy that allows connections only from internal IP ranges.

This policy ensures that services like MySQL are not exposed to 0.0.0.0/0 (the entire internet).

Steps:

Step 1: Define the hierarchical firewall policy at the organization level.

Step 2: Set the rule to allow traffic only from internal IP ranges.

Step 3: Apply the policy to all projects under the organization.

Benefits:

Centralized management of network security.

Prevents accidental exposure of services to the public internet, enhancing security.

Here are the permissions available to organizationRoleAdmin

iam.roles.create

iam.roles.delete

iam.roles.undelete

iam.roles.get

iam.roles.list

iam.roles.update

resourcemanager.projects.get

resourcemanager.projects.getIamPolicy

resourcemanager.projects.list

resourcemanager.organizations.get

resourcemanager.organizations.getIamPolicy

There are sufficient as per least privilege policy. You can do user management as well as auditing.

https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/understanding-custom-roles

To ensure that PII data is separated from non-PII data, using Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions to trigger a scan by the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API is an effective approach. This method allows for automated detection and handling of PII.

Steps:

Set Up Cloud Pub/Sub: Configure a Cloud Pub/Sub topic to receive notifications whenever a file is uploaded to the shared Cloud Storage bucket.

Deploy Cloud Functions: Create a Cloud Function that is triggered by the Pub/Sub topic. This function will invoke the DLP API to scan the uploaded file for PII.

Move Detected PII Files: If the scan detects PII, the Cloud Function will move the file to a secure Cloud Storage bucket accessible only by the administrator.

Set Permissions: Ensure that appropriate permissions are set on the Cloud Storage buckets to restrict access to files containing PII.