At Google Cloud, we operate in a shared fate model, working in concert with our customers to help achieve stronger security outcomes. One of the ways we do this is to identify potentially risky behavior to help customers determine if action is appropriate. To this end, we now provide insights on what we are calling Sensitive Actions.

Sensitive Actions, now available in Preview, are focused on understanding IAM account, or user account, behavior. They are changes made in a Google Cloud environment that are security relevant — and therefore important to be aware of and evaluate — because they may be precursors to an attack, an effort to make other attacks possible, or part of an effort to monetize a compromised account. They can quickly highlight potentially malicious activities that are facilitated by authentication cookie theft, and are another defense-in-depth mechanism that Google Cloud offers to help address this attack vector.

The Sensitive Actions that are detected today will appear in two places. They are available in Security Command Center Premium, the primary source for security and risk alerts in Google Cloud, as Observations from the Sensitive Actions Service. They are also available in Cloud Logging, where we recommend that customers integrate them into their monitoring workflows.

Sensitive Actions include the following list of action names (mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK tactics that these actions may correspond to) and descriptions:

To ensure that adversaries do not have mechanisms to disable this protection or hide logs from users, Sensitive Actions is an on-by-default service now enabled for Cloud customers. In cases where customers have certain privacy controls or policy restrictions applied to their logging pipeline, their logs will not be analyzed by this service.

You can learn more about Sensitive Actions and our overall recommendations for keeping your account secure by visiting our documentation here.

I’m excited to share our first Cloud CISO Perspectives post of 2022. It’s already shaping up to be an eventful year for our industry and we’re only in month one. There’s a lot to recap in this post, including the U.S. government’s recent efforts to address critical security issues, like open source software security and zero trust architectures. We’ve also released new resources from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team like the Cloud Security Megatrends and the Boards of Directors whitepaper on cloud risk governance. 

Cloud Security Megatrends 

We’re often asked if the cloud is more secure than on-prem (and why) so we shared our answer in a recent blog post. At Google Cloud, security by design is our priority. We’ve long adopted zero-trust principles for our baseline security architectures and built a global network that relies on defense in depth layers to protect against configuration errors and attacks. But security is always evolving and that is why we also take advantage of the following megatrends:

1. Economy of scale: Decreasing the marginal cost of security raises the baseline level of security. 
2. Shared fate: A flywheel of increasing trust drives more transition to the cloud, which compels even higher security and even more skin-in-the-game from the cloud provider.
3. Healthy competition: The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading security technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation. 
4. Cloud as the digital immune system: Every security update the cloud gives the customer is informed by some threat, vulnerability, or new attack technique often identified by someone else’s experience. Enterprise IT leaders use this accelerating feedback loop to get better protection.
5. Software-defined infrastructure: Cloud is software defined, so it can be dynamically configured without customers having to manage hardware placement or cope with administrative toil. From a security standpoint, that means specifying security policies as code, and continuously monitoring their effectiveness.
6. Increasing deployment velocity: Because of cloud’s vast scale, providers have had to automate software deployments and updates, usually with automated continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems. That same automation delivers security enhancements, resulting in more frequent security updates.
7. Simplicity: Cloud becomes an abstraction-generating machine for identifying, creating and deploying simpler default modes of operating securely and autonomically. 
8. Sovereignty meets sustainability: The cloud’s global scale and ability to operate in localized and distributed ways creates three pillars of sovereignty. This global scale can also be leveraged to improve energy efficiency.

If you’re an IT decision maker, pay attention to these megatrends that will continue to drive and reinforce cloud security and will outpace the security of on-prem infrastructure well into the future. 

U.S. Federal government cybersecurity momentum 

• Open source software security: Earlier this month, Google participated in the White House Summit on open source software security. The meeting came at a critical time for the industry following December’s Log4j vulnerabilities and was both a recognition of the challenge and an important first step towards addressing it. The open source software ecosystem is not homogenous, despite the fact that the industry often thinks of or treats it this way. Some of it, like Linux, is highly curated, while other critical software is supported through diffuse communities including technology companies and other stakeholders. There is also a long tail of many other critical projects driven by a dedicated community of maintainers around the world, including Googlers. In light of this reality, we welcomed the chance to share our recommendations to advance the future of open source software security. Some work we’ve done includes founding the Open Source Security Foundation, which has been instrumental already in making security improvements. We’ve also helped drive a number of key security initiatives within the open source community including security scorecards, the SLSA framework to improve the security and integrity of open source packages, and Secure Open Source Rewards to financially incentivize improvements to critical open source security projects.  
• OMB’s Federal zero trust strategy: The publication of the Office of Management and Budget’s zero trust architecture strategy marks an important step for the U.S. federal government’s efforts to modernize under Executive Order 14028. Google Cloud supports this approach, which recognizes the immense security benefits offered by modern computing architectures. For the past decade, Google has successfully applied zero trust principles through our BeyondCorp and BeyondProd frameworks for providing end-user access and securing our cloud workloads. And we’ve brought these best practices from our own journey to global governments and businesses of any size through solutions like BeyondCorp Enterprise and capabilities like Binary Authorization and Anthos Service Mesh, which are embedded in Anthos, our managed application platform. For Federal agencies embarking on this zero trust journey, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will offer our expertise by conducting Zero Trust Foundations strategy workshops, which can help organizations in the public and private sectors develop actionable and achievable strategies and plans for zero trust implementation. 

Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights 

Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources across our security teams this month: 

Security

• Democratizing security operations: We recently announced that Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider, is joining Google Cloud to help companies better manage their threat response. Providing a proven SOAR capability with Chronicle’s approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision to advance invisible security and democratize security operations for every organization.
• Security by design: The Highmark Health security team is using “secure-by-design” techniques to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of its Living Health solution with Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO). Google has long advocated for and followed security by design principles, which is why we’re continuously building enhanced security, controls, resiliency and more into our cloud products and services. 
• Secure collaboration for hybrid work environments: The Google Workspace team shared its recommendations for businesses as they prepare for the future of work,  where the hybrid/flexible work model is becoming standard practice and a new approach to security is essential.
• Anthos Policy Controller CIS Benchmark enforcement: A big part of our shared fate philosophy is to build secure products and not just security products. A recent example of this in action is embedding CIS benchmark policy conformance in the Anthos Policy Controller. We believe the more we embed approaches like this into our products, the more application and infrastructure teams can intrinsically embed security at the start and reduce toil for the security team.
• DevOps for technology-driven organizations and startups: A key success factor for many security programs is the partnership and integration with development teams, and there are some great resources and lessons in our DORA research.
• Security by design with Chrome OS: ABN AMRO’s Asia-Pacific region team recently shared how they are using Chrome OS and CloudReady to work securely in the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership, and add flexibility for employees. This is a great example of secure by design principles in the use of Chromium.

Risk & Compliance

• Boards of Directors summary guide to cloud risk governance: The latest whitepaper from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team outlines how boards of directors can prioritize safe, secure, and compliant adoption processes for cloud technologies within their organizations.  
• TruSight Risk Assessment of Google Cloud: TruSight recently released a comprehensive
  risk assessment report on Google Cloud. Our Enterprise Trust team collaborated on this robust assessment of Google Cloud services to validate the design and implementation of controls. TruSight’s risk assessment of our security controls will help customers accelerate and complete their risk management due diligence.
• Data governance: Check out this new blog series on data governance where our teams explain the role of data governance, its importance, and the necessary processes to run an effective data governance program. Implementing data governance will help maximize value derived from business data, build user trust, and ensure compliance with required security measures.

Controls and Products

• Encrypting Data Fusion: To help meet the security, privacy and compliance requirements of customers in regulated industries like finance or public sector, we announced the general availability of Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) integration for Cloud Data Fusion, which enables encryption of both user data and metadata at rest with a key that customers can control through our Cloud Key Management Service (KMS). 

Don’t forget to sign-up for our newsletter if you’d like to have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox. We’ll be back next month with more updates and security-related news.

For more than a decade, Google has applied a Zero Trust approach to most aspects of our operations. Zero Trust’s core tenet–that implicit trust in any single component of a complex, interconnected system can create serious security risks–is fundamental to how we operate and build our security architecture.

Early in our security journey, we realized that despite our best efforts user credentials would periodically fall into the hands of malicious actors. This is why we developed the BeyondCorp framework. We needed additional layers of defense against unauthorized access that would not impede user productivity. We also understood that software that interacts with the larger world should not have a perimeter-based trust model. These realizations led to the layered protection in our BeyondProd framework, which extends the Zero Trust paradigm to our production workloads.

Earlier this year, the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a Federal Strategy to Move the U.S. Government Towards a Zero Trust Architecture. This marks an important step for the U.S. government’s efforts to modernize under Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. In parallel, guidance from the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) has also called for the move to a Zero Trust approach to security and outlined in 2021 its report on Zero Trust architecture design principles.

Adopting a Zero Trust approach can help organizations inside and outside the public sector stay ahead of both regulatory requirements and security threats, but it requires thoughtful planning and execution. Our goal is to bring the best practices for Zero Trust together in one place, leveraging the experiences and knowledge of our existing customers, and Google’s own experience with implementing Zero Trust.

How Google Cloud can help government agencies move toward Zero Trust

Agencies can rely on Google Zero Trust capabilities for remote access, secure collaboration, and boundary security. To better serve the Zero Trust needs of our customers, we introduced BeyondCorp Enterprise in January 2021, a solution that provides Zero Trust secure access to resources and applications in the cloud and on-premises. BeyondCorp Enterprise was built based on years of Google’s own innovation as we implemented Zero Trust globally for ourselves. It leverages the Chrome browser and Google’s global network, and it offers integrated real-time threat and data protection.

Here are five ways BeyondCorp Enterprise can be applied to help organizations adopt the Zero Trust cybersecurity principles set forth in the recent White House memorandum (M-22-09) and other global government guidance for Zero Trust.

1. Enable enterprise applications to be used over the public internet: It’s no secret that VPN usage poses daily burdens and long-term challenges for IT and cybersecurity managers, as well as end-users. BeyondCorp Enterprise provides users with seamless and secure access to web applications (including SaaS apps and apps hosted on any cloud), plus central management controls and threat and data protection capabilities, all built-in to the Chrome browser. Through BeyondCorp Enterprise, end-users can access applications simply and still benefit from enterprise-grade security, without sacrificing their productivity or user experience.
2. Leverage phishing-resistant MFA to access secure resources: Many cyberattacks start with phishing messages that lead users to infected websites and attempt to steal credentials. The use of phishing-resistant MFA, as recommended by M-22-09, can protect personnel from sophisticated online attacks. BeyondCorp Enterprise supports strong phishing-resistant authentication, by allowing factors such as Titan Security Keys to be used as attributes in access policies that are enforced at the application layer. Organizations can customize how to incorporate phishing-resistant MFA methods into their access policies for individual applications and resources. Phishing protection is also built into the Chrome browser, powered by Google Safe Browsing, and these capabilities block access to malicious content, detect phishing sites, prevent malware transfers, and generate reports of unsafe activity, adding even more protection against bad actors.

3. Use context-aware authorization: The U.S. federal strategy states that a Zero Trust architecture should incorporate more granularly and dynamically defined permissions and that every request for access should be evaluated to determine whether it is appropriate. With context-aware authorization, organizations can build and customize access policies to include different contextual signals about a user including their role, their location, and even the time of day. Every interaction between a user and a BeyondCorp-protected resource is evaluated in real-time against the resource’s access policy to ensure users are and remain authorized to access it, with continuous authorization for all interactions at a per request level.
4. Incorporate device-level signal into authentication: At Google, we believe that trust must be granted based on what is known about a user’s identity and their device. We are pleased that OMB similarly recommends that authentication incorporate at least one device-level signal alongside identity information. Since BeyondCorp Enterprise supports device-level attributes without requiring users to install agents, this can be done easily by leveraging the Endpoint Verification extension in the Chrome browser, where administrators can gather endpoint security posture information and easily construct and implement granular resource access policies. The ability to collect and utilize this information through an agentless approach is especially helpful for BeyondCorp Enterprise customers who support a workforce with bring-your-own-device policies or unmanaged devices.
5. Include the extended workforce in your Zero Trust strategy: A Zero Trust approach aimed to provide secure access to the right users, at the right time, and for the right purposes should be inclusive of all users, not just full-time staff. Government agencies rely on contractors and partners to carry out many important missions. Unfortunately, the extended workforce is often more vulnerable to attacks if they are given too much privileged access or if their security practices are not properly assessed before access is provisioned. At the same time, federal administrators can’t always manage third-party devices or software directly, which can make secure access challenging.

BeyondCorp Enterprise supports a feature called protected profiles, an ideal solution for granting Zero Trust access to the extended workforce. It enables users to securely access resources from unmanaged devices and be protected by the same security capabilities without needing to install agents. Furthermore, administrators can gain visibility into risky activities and view any security events that are generated from within protected profiles.

Applying the NCSC Zero Trust principles on Google Cloud

Last year, the U.K. government’s NCSC launched its Zero Trust architecture design principles to help organizations securely adopt a Zero Trust architecture. To help private and public sector organizations in the U.K., the Google Cybersecurity Action Team (GCAT) released a detailed research paper that outlines how organizations can leverage Google Cloud technologies and services to align with these principles. This is a technical guide aimed at enterprise and security architects charged with developing and executing a Zero Trust strategy under the principles outlined by the NCSC, including:

• Know your architecture, including users, devices, services and data with Google Cloud Professional Services Organization (PSO) who can support discovery, planning and risk mitigation.
• Know your User, Service and Device identities including reference architectures for Cloud Identity.
• Assess your user behavior, device and service health by leveraging built in reporting from Google Cloud and Chronicle.
• Use policies to authorize requests with BeyondCorp Enterprise policy-based authorization.
• Authenticate & Authorize everywhere by reviewing the BeyondCorp and BeyondProd frameworks which combine to deliver ubiquitous authentication and authorization.
• Focus your monitoring on users, devices and services with device management and Cloud native monitoring capabilities.
• Don’t trust any network, including your own. Review details on Google’s Secure by Design infrastructure.
• Choose services designed for Zero Trust. Review how to protect modern and legacy applications with BeyondCorp.

For more detail on how we’re supporting the U.K.’s NCSC, please review our recent research paper for insight into their priorities, and where Google will be discussing Secure by Design principles and how to respond to security incidents.

Zero Trust assessment and planning services for organizations

Organizations that are managing complex environments while undergoing Zero Trust adoption could benefit strongly from experienced support and guidance. The Google Cybersecurity Action Team (GCAT) is committed to helping customers meet Zero Trust security and compliance requirements in the cloud through specialized consulting engagements and workshops for public sector customers. Read more about how growing cybersecurity requirements for U.S. federal government customers via executive orders and White House mandates are being supported through Google Cloud solutions.

GCAT’s multi-week Zero Trust Foundations engagement helps organizations build a strategy to achieve a Zero Trust security model across their operations. Zero Trust Foundations is co-delivered by Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO and our public sector Professional Services Organization. It can help focus and accelerate customers’ Zero Trust efforts by sharing lessons learned from Google’s own BeyondCorp zero-trust journey, and our global implementation of defense-in-depth best practices. Contact us today to learn more.

To learn more about ways Google Cloud can help organizations embarking on a Zero Trust journey, tune into our second annual Google Cloud Security Summit on May 17 and hear directly from customers who are already using our Zero Trust solutions to achieve their organization’s security goals.

About the Authors:
Jeanette Manfra is the former Assistant Director for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. Dan Prieto is the former Director of the Defense Industrial Base Cybersecurity program at the Department of Defense. Both Dan and Jeanette also served in the White House on the staff of the National Security Council’s cybersecurity directorate.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on Tuesday announced the completion of the third round of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process, and we are pleased to share that a submission (SPHINCS+) with Google’s involvement was selected for standardization. Two submissions (Classic McEliece, BIKE) are being considered for the next round. 

We want to congratulate the Googlers involved in the submissions (Stefan Kölbl, Rafael Misoczki, and Christiane Peters) and thank Sophie Schmieg for moving PQC efforts forward at Google. We would also like to congratulate all the participants and thank NIST for their dedication to advancing these important issues for the entire ecosystem.

This work is incredibly important as we continue to advance quantum computing. Large-scale quantum computers will be powerful enough to break most public-key cryptosystems currently in use and compromise digital communications on the Internet and elsewhere. The goal of PQC is to develop cryptographic systems that safeguard against these potential threats, and NIST’s announcement is a critical step toward that goal. Governments in particular are in a race to secure information because foreign adversaries can harvest sensitive information now and decrypt it later.  

At Google, our work on PQC is focused on four areas: 1) driving industry contributions to standards bodies;  2) moving the ecosystem beyond theory and into practice (primarily through testing PQC algorithms); 3) taking action to ensure that Google is PQC ready; and 4) helping customers manage the transition to PQC. 

Driving industry contributions to a range of standards bodies 

In addition to our work with NIST, we continue to drive industry contributions to international standards bodies to help advance PQC standards. This includes ISO 14888-4, where Googlers are the editors for a standard on stateful hash-based signatures. More recently, we also contributed to the IETF proposal on data formats, which will define JSON and CBOR serialization formats for PQC digital signature schemes. These standards, collectively, will enable large organizations to build PQC solutions that are compatible and ease the transition globally.

Moving the ecosystem beyond theory and into practice: Testing PQC algorithms

We’ve been working with the security community for over a decade to explore options for PQC algorithms beyond theoretical implementations. We announced in 2016 an experiment in Chrome where a small fraction of connections between desktop Chrome and Google’s servers used a post-quantum key-exchange algorithm, in addition to the elliptic-curve key-exchange algorithm that would typically be used. By adding a post-quantum algorithm in a hybrid mode with the existing key-exchange, we were able to test its implementation without affecting user security. 

We took this work further in 2019 and announced a wide-scale post-quantum experiment with Cloudflare. We worked together to implement two post-quantum key exchanges, integrated them into Cloudflare’s TLS stack, and deployed the implementation on edge servers and in Chrome Canary clients. Through this work, we learned more about the performance and feasibility of deployment in TLS of two post-quantum key agreements, and have continued to integrate these learnings into our technology roadmap.  

In 2021, we tested broader deployment of post-quantum confidentiality in TLS and discovered a range of network products that were incompatible with post-quantum TLS. We were able to work with the vendor so that the issue was fixed in future firmware updates. By experimenting early, we resolved this issue for future deployments.

Taking action to ensure that Google is PQC ready

At Google, we’re well into a multi-year effort to migrate to post-quantum cryptography that is designed to address both immediate and long-term risks to protect sensitive information. We have one goal: ensure that Google is PQC ready. Internally, this effort has several key priorities, including securing asymmetric encryption, in particular encryption in transit. This means using ALTS, for which we are using a hybrid key-exchange, to secure internal traffic; and using TLS (consistent with NIST standards) for external traffic. A second priority is securing signatures in the case of hard-to-change public keys or keys with a long lifetime, in particular focusing on hardware, especially hardware deployed outside of Google’s control. 

We’re also focused on sharing the information we learn to help others address PQC challenges. For example, we recently published a paper that includes PQC transition timelines, leading strategies to protect systems against quantum attacks, and approaches for combining pre-quantum cryptography with PQC to minimize transition risks. The paper also suggests standards to start experimenting with now and provides a series of other recommendations to allow organizations to achieve a smooth and timely PQC transition.

Helping customers manage the transition to PQC

At Google Cloud, we are working with many large enterprises to ensure they are crypto-agile and to help them prepare for the PQC transition. We fully expect customers to turn to us for post-quantum cloud capabilities, and we will be ready. We are committed to supporting their PQC transition with a range of Google products, services, and infrastructure. As we make progress, we will continue to provide more PQC updates on Google core, cloud, and other services, and updates will also come from Android, Chrome and other teams. We will further support our customers with Google Cloud transformation partners like the Google Cybersecurity Action Team to help provide deep technical expertise on PQC topics. 

Additional References:

• Google Cloud Security Foundations Guide
• Google Cloud Architecture Framework 
• Google infrastructure security design overview