I'm migrating projects that don't have an organization to a new organization. As I understand it, Cloud Identity is required when using an organization.
Will the existing users in in the projects with the same domain as the organization automatically be manageable in Cloud Identity?
How is the user group functionality in Cloud Identity different from user group functionality in the Cloud console IAM section? Would any groups created in IAM before or after the migration be visible in Cloud Identity?
Yes, Cloud Identity is required to use an Organization in Google Cloud.
Cloud identity is basically an identity provider (IdP) in which you create the user and group objects and manage parameters such as security factors (MFA) and application access. If you have a non organization project with existing users that have your domain, then it is likely they are regular 'Google' accounts, when you establish your Cloud Identity instance there is a process to consolidate them, they are called Unmanaged users .
Before adding users to your organization, use the Transfer tool for unmanaged users to see if you have any unmanaged personal Google accounts. The transfer tool enables you to see what unmanaged users exist, and then invite those unmanaged users to the domain.
You can also refer user groups in the cloud console IAM section, if you have a project and you have been managing groups within the IAM section, that would indicate that there is already a Cloud Identity instance behind and that the project is part of an organization. Which means, any groups created in the IAM section will be visible in Cloud Identity.
Refer Project migration for more information.
Related
I have two service-accounts for GCP and would like to use them for authentication in same project that I am working on. Both are required to access different storage services. Is that possible?
Only user-managed service accounts can be attached to an instance, and an instance can have only one attached service account. You can change the service account that is attached to an instance at creation time or later on
. to read more about service account you can refer to this
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The short answer for GCP projects is yes, you can use two user-managed service accounts on the same project, but for the particular case of Google Cloud Storage, you must use Service agents.
Please read this guide to be aware of the Organization policy constraints for Cloud Storage.
Merely as an example, if you want to let your application's service account access objects in a Cloud Storage bucket, you can grant the service account the Storage Object Viewer role roles/storage.objectViewer on the bucket. You can follow this guide to manage the access to service accounts.
So, we have a "Compute Engine default service account", and everything is clear with it:
it's a legacy account with excessive permission
it used to be limited by "scope" assigned to each GCE instance or instances group
it's recommended to delete this account and use custom service account for each service with the least privilege principle.
The second "default service account" mentioned in the docs is the "App Engine default service account". Presumably it's assigned to the App Engine instances and it's also a legacy thing that needs to be treated similarly to the Compute Engine default service account. Right?
And what about "Google APIs Service Agent"? It has the "Editor" role. As far as I understand, this account is used internally by GCP and is not accessed by any custom resources I create as a user. Does it mean that there is no reason to reduce its permissions for the sake of complying with the best security practices?
You don't have to delete your default service account however at some point it's best to create accounts that have minimum permissions required for the job and refine the permissions to suit your needs instead of using default ones.
You have full control over this account so you can change it's permissions at any moment or even delete it:
Google creates the Compute Engine default service account and adds it to your project automatically but you have full control over the account.
The Compute Engine default service account is created with the IAM basic Editor role, but you can modify your service account's roles to control the service account's access to Google APIs.
You can disable or delete this service account from your project, but doing so might cause any applications that depend on the service account's credentials to fail
If something stops working you can recover the account up to 90 days.
It's also advisable not to use service accounts during development at all since this may pose security risk in the future.
Google APIs Service Agent which
This service account is designed specifically to run internal Google processes on your behalf. The account is owned by Google and is not listed in the Service Accounts section of Cloud Console
Addtiionally:
Certain resources rely on this service account and the default editor permissions granted to the service account. For example, managed instance groups and autoscaling uses the credentials of this account to create, delete, and manage instances. If you revoke permissions to the service account, or modify the permissions in such a way that it does not grant permissions to create instances, this will cause managed instance groups and autoscaling to stop working.
For these reasons, you should not modify this service account's roles unless a role recommendation explicitly suggests that you modify them.
Having said that we can conclude that remooving either default service account or Google APIs Service Agent is risky and requires a lot of preparation (especially that latter one).
Have a look at the best practices documentation describing what's recommended and what not when managing service accounts.
Also you can have a look at securing them against any expoitation and changing the service account and access scope for an instances.
When you talk about security, you especially talk about risk. So, what are the risks with the default service account.
If you use them on GCE or Cloud Run (the Compute Engine default service account) you have over permissions. If your environment is secured, the risk is low (especially on Cloud Run). On GCE the risk is higher because you have to keep up to date the VM and to control the firewall rules to access to your VM.
Note: by default, Google Cloud create a VPC with firewall rules open to 0.0.0.0/0 on port 22, RDP and ICMP. It's also a security issue to fix by default.
The App Engine default service account is used by App Engine and Cloud Functions by default. Same as Cloud Run, the risk can be considered as low.
Another important aspect is the capacity to generate service account key files on those default services accounts. Service account key file are simple JSON file with a private key in it. This time the risk is very high because a few developers take REALLY care of the security of that file.
Note: In a previous company, the only security issues that we had came from those files, especially with service account with the editor role
Most of the time, the user doesn't need a service account key file to develop (I wrote a bunch of articles on that on Medium)
There is 2 ways to mitigate those risks.
Perform IaC (Infra as code, with product like teraform) to create and deploy your projects and to enforce all the best security practices that you have defined in your company (VPC without default firewall rules, no editor role on service accounts,...)
Use organisation policies, especially this one "Disable service account key creation" to prevent the service account key creation, and this one "Disable Automatic IAM Grants for Default Service Accounts" to prevent the editor role on the default service accounts.
The deletion isn't a solution, but a good knowledge of the risk, a good security culture in the team and some organisation policies are the key.
My organization is using GCP, and we have service accounts created for me and my co-workers. We need to use BigQuery storage transfer service, Cloud Dataflow and other Google Cloud resources.
1)So, what will be the recommended way of creating the scheduling job or creating the resources. Shall we create it via our service accounts or create another service account for the project and use that to schedule and use resources?
2)If it is done via my organization provided service account, what happens when I leave the organization and my service account is deleted. Does the jobs and pipelines continue to run under that project, or the resources are stopped?
NOTE Stackoverflow is focused on programming questions and this is not a programming question but more a question for help with architecture (guidance).
Service Accounts are non-user identities supported by Google.
Service Accounts are intended to be used by software|processes.
Service Accounts are Google resources that are "owned" by Google Projects (not Organizations nor users).
Service Accounts are deleted by Project members (users or indeed other Service Accounts that may inherit Project-specific roles from an Organization).
If a user (i.e. you) were to leave the organization, your org admins would likely delete your user account. This would not delete any Service Accounts. However, if your user identity had unique roles in the organization (represented by IAM permissions in the Google Organization and/or Project(s)), access to resources including Service Accounts could become inaccessible. For this reason, good org hygiene recommends that admin-like roles be assigned to groups rather than individual users.
I think it's good practice to create Service Accounts for software|processes on a per function basis. Some job should have its own Service Account.
This approach results in more Service Accounts but, it enables each Service Account to be exquisitely suited (IAM roles|permissions) to its job.
I am creating a service account in a project en GCP, but a friend told me not to do that, instead to use a service account that already exists in another project.
So, the question is.
A service account created in a project in GCP can be used to access resources of diferent projects? or, it is only valid to access resources of the project where it was created?
Creating a service account is similar to adding a member to your project, but the service account belongs to your applications rather than an individual end user.
#dishant makwana is right, you can use a Service Account in any project, but you need to take in consideration some security factors.
Per my experience you should only grant the service account the minimum set of permissions required, even though you are only using your Service Account in a single project.
You can get more information in the following link: Granting minimum permissions to service accounts
Another good practice is to create service accounts for each service with only the permissions required for that service.
You could check this documentation with some best practices for Service Accounts.
Additionally, depending on your requirements you could consider to create short-lived credentials that allow you to assume the identity of a Google Cloud service account.
The most common use case for these credentials is to temporarily delegate access to Google Cloud resources across different projects, organizations, or accounts.
You could find more information in this link
When using GCP with cloud identity, we have a special a group which includes all users of the organization (all from cloud identity directory). It is perfect to give access to all users in the projects.
However, it doesn't include the service accounts in projects.
My question is, is there any special group to include all service account which exists in the organisation and in their projects?
Describing the use case:
We have some agents which we need to install in our compute engine instances. So, we would like to store the installers in a central bucket, and give permission in that bucket to all service accounts in our organization (with a special group permission, not handle all individual service account in the bucket...).
Thanks.
Regards,
Vassco Silva
You can use Google groups which uses a collection of user and/or service accounts. Once this is done, add the service accounts to the Google group and then assign the necessary IAM roles to the Google group.