We created Traffic Director to bring to you a fully managed service mesh product that includes load balancing, traffic management and service discovery. And now, we’re happy to announce the availability of a fully-managed zero-trust security solution using Traffic Director with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Certificate Authority (CA) Service.

When platform administrators and security professionals think about modernizing their applications with a forward-looking security posture, they look for “zero-trust” security. This security posture is based on few fundamental blocks:

1. A means of allocating and asserting service identity (for example, using X.509 certificates)
2. Mutual authentication (mTLS) or server authentication (TLS)
3. Encryption for all traffic flows (TLS encryption)
4. Authorization checks and minimal privileges
5. Infrastructure to make all of the above manageable and reliable

Traffic Director does this by integrating with CA Service, a highly available private CA which issues private certificates expressing service identities, and provides a managed mTLS certificate infrastructure with full certificate lifecycle management. Together, these solve both certificate issuance and CA rotation complexities. 

With Traffic Director managing your service-to-service security, you can now enjoy end-to-end encryption, service-level authentication and granular authorization policies for your service mesh.

With this new capability, you can now:

• Implement mutual TLS (mTLS) and TLS between your services, including certificate lifecycle management. Communications within your mesh are authenticated and encrypted.
• Enable identity-based authorization, as well as authorization based on other parameters (such as the request method). These concepts underpin role-based access controls (RBAC) and enable you to take a “least privileges” stance where only authorized services can communicate with each other based on ALLOW/DENY rules.

mTLS is supported whether you’re using Envoy or proxyless gRPC for your service mesh. Authorization support for proxyless gRPC is coming later this year. Check out our documentation to learn more and get started with Envoy or proxyless gRPC.

Security is often seen as a zero-sum game between “go fast” or “stay secure.” We would like to challenge this school of thought and introduce a framework to change that paradigm to a “win-win game,” so you can do both—“go fast” and “stay secure.”

Historically, application security tools have been implemented much like a gate at a parking lot. The parking lot has perimeter-based ingress and egress boom gates. The boom gates let one car through at a time, and vehicles often are backed up at the gates during busy hours. However, there are few controls once you get inside. You can access nearly any space on any level and easily move between levels.

When you apply this analogy to application development, AppSec tools are often implemented as “toll gates” within waterfall-native workflows. Developers are required to get in line, submit to a security scan, and wait to see the results. When the results are produced, developers spend significant time and energy investigating red flags raised by security. This process is slow and, not surprisingly, not very popular with developers. It’s why they often view traditional security programs as inhibitors to innovation.

Guardrails not gates

We suggest a workflow that’s less like a parking lot gate and more like a freeway with common-sense safety measures. Freeways have directive rules for all users. Speed limits, single direction of travel, and mandatory speed reduction zones when exiting contribute to freeway safety. Some freeways implement preventative measures based on these rules, such as physical walls dividing opposite flows of traffic and protective guardrails to reduce collisions and keep vehicles from veering off the road. While driving on a freeway comes with its own complications, there are no boom-style gates blocking your path.

Following the same directive rules, there are detective and responsive controls, such as speed detectors, cameras, signs reminding drivers which direction they are going, and how fast they are traveling. Some freeways have deployed rumble strips to remind a dozing driver to stay in their lane.

Applying lessons from freeways to application development and compliance in the cloud represents the perfect opportunity to build software more securely.

Modern application security tools should be fully automated, largely invisible to developers, and minimize friction within the DevOps pipeline. To do this, these security tools should work the way developers want to work. Security controls should integrate into the development lifecycle early and everywhere. These controls should live within the developer’s preferred tools and create rapid feedback loops so mistakes can be remediated as soon as possible.

A typical compliance cycle looks like this:

Here, we highlight the gap between the desired state and the actual state that becomes problematic when audit times come. This increases the overall cost of the audit and the time spent in generating the evidence of controls.

Instead, this is what we need.

We need the actual state to track the desired state continuously. We need continuous preventative controls to stop insecure resources from being introduced. We need detective controls to find non-compliant resources promptly and constantly. We need responsive controls to fix non-compliant resources automatically. In all, we need continuous compliance.

Infrastructure continuous compliance reference architecture

How do we get started with continuous compliance? Here is the reference architecture that enables you to develop this capability.

The architecture is centered on building a close-loop of directive, preventative, detective and responsive controls. It is also open and extensible. Although we reference Google Cloud architectures in this blog, you can use them for other cloud service platforms or even on-premise

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) is a helpful resource to express your control library in a machine-readable format. OSCAL can allow organizations to define a set of security and privacy requirements, which are represented as controls, which then can be grouped together as a control catalog. Organizations can use these catalogs to establish security and privacy control baselines through a process that may aggregate and tailor controls from multiple source catalogs. Using the OSCAL profile model to express a baseline makes the mappings between the control catalog and the profile explicit and machine-readable.

Directive controls

The starting point of the close-loop is the directive and harmonized controls. Next, you should have control mappings rationalized to the technical controls against your compliance requirements. These requirements can come from various sources, such as the threat landscape of your industry, your internal security policies and standards, your external regulatory compliance, and industry best practice frameworks.

Control mappings will form a Technical Control Library. The library is a dataset mapping out harmonized controls to requirements written in different compliance frameworks. The control mapping justifies the security controls. It builds the linkage between security and compliance and helps you reduce your compliance audit cost. This dataset should be a living document.

An easy first step in building such as library is to begin with the CIS Google Cloud Platform Foundation Benchmark. The benchmark is lightweight and it constitutes foundational security any entity should get right on Google Cloud. In addition, Security Command Center Premium’s Security Health Analytics can help you to monitor your Google Cloud environment against these benchmarks on a continuous basis across all the projects within your organization.

The Technical Control Library will guide the rest of the closed-loop. For every directive control, you should have corresponding preventative control to stop non-compliant resources from being deployed. You should have the detective control to look over the entire environment seeking non-compliant resources. And you should have the responsive control remedying non-compliant resources automatically or kicking off responsive workflow with your Security Operations function. Finally, every policy evaluation point should have a feedback loop to the engineers. A prompt and meaningful feedback loop provides a better engineering experience and increases development velocity in the short run. These feedback loops will breed good behaviors to write better and more secure code in the long run.

Preventive controls

Almost every action on the Google Cloud is an API call, such as when creating, configuring, or deleting resources, so preventative controls are all about API call constraints. There are different wrappers for these API calls, including Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solutions such as Terraform or Google Cloud Deployment Manager, the Cloud Console interface, Cloud Shell SDK, Python, or GO SDK.

As with any other application code deployment, the IaC solutions should use a Continuous Integration (CI) solution. On the CI, you could orchestrate IaC constraints, similar to writing unit tests for application code. Since all IaC solutions come in or can be converted to JSON format, you can use Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the IaC constraint solution. OPA’s Rego policy language is declarative and flexible, which allows you to construct almost any policy in Rego.

For the input sources that are not IaC, you could fall back to the organization policies and IAM as these two controls have the closest proximity to Google Cloud. That said, it’s considered a best practice to restrict non-IaC inputs for higher environments such as production-like or production, so you could codify your infrastructure, apply controls and workflows in the source repository.

Detective and responsive controls

Even if you’ve nailed the preventive controls, and the cloud environment is sterile, we still need detective and responsive controls. Here’s why.

For one, not all the controls can be safely implemented as preventative controls in the real world. For instance, we may not fail all the Google Compute Engine deployments at the CI if these VMs have external IP addresses because external IP addresses may be required for a specific software or use cases. Another reason is that we want to produce time-stamped compliance status for audit purposes. Taking the CIS compliance as an example, we could have enforced all the CIS check on the CI and set IaC as the only deployment source for cloud infrastructure.

However, we will still need to demonstrate the runtime CIS compliance report using Security Command Center. Security responsive controls are not limited to remediation actions. They can also take the form of notifications via email, messaging tools, or integration with ITSM systems. If you use Terraform to deploy the infrastructure and use Cloud Function for auto-remediation, you need to pay attention to the Terraform state. Since auto-remediation actions performed by Cloud Function are not recorded in the Terraform state file, you will need to inform the engineers to update the source Terraform code.

The future

The fact that manual processes around security and compliance don’t scale points to automation as the next enabler. The economics of automation require a systemic discipline and holistic enterprise-wide approach to regulatory compliance and cloud risk management.

By defining a data model of the compliance process, the aforementioned OSCAL represents a game-changer for automation in risk management and regulatory compliance. While we realize that adopting “as code” practices is a long-term investment for most of our customers, Risk and Compliance as Code (RCaC) has a number of building blocks to get you started. By adopting the RCaC tenets you shift towards codified policies and infrastructure for a secure cloud transformation. Stay tuned as we introduce exciting new capabilities and features to Google Cloud Risk and Compliance as Code in the months to come.

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.

We’re excited to announce that Google Cloud Next returns on October 11–13, 2022. 

Join us for keynotes from industry luminaries and engage live with Google developers. Explore dynamic content across various learning levels, and dive deep into technologies and solutions spanning the Google Cloud and Google Workspace portfolios. Participate in breakout sessions, demos, and hands-on training. Hear from the world’s leading companies about their digital transformation journeys. You’ll have opportunities to connect with experts, get inspired, and boost your skills. We can’t wait to see you at Next ’22!

It’s too early to determine how the event experience will span the digital and physical worlds, so please stay tuned for updates as we plan with the health and safety of the attendees in mind. In the meantime, mark October 11–13 in your calendar, and visit our event site for updates. For more inspiration, rediscover Next ’21, now available on demand.

I’ve been at Google Cloud just a few weeks, following years of experience as an AWS Hero and building on other clouds. So last week’s Google Cloud Next–my first!—was a bit of a culture shock. On the GCP podcast, I used the word “intentionality” to describe what I’m seeing: a thoughtful, holistic approach that informs so much of how Google Cloud is put together. Not just in the headline-grabbing new announcements like Google Distributed Cloud, but in the everyday things too. 

Things like IAM and project setup. Step 1 of any cloud project is to provision access to an environment, and that’s why I always found it so frustrating in my past life when I had to deal with outdated or clunky stuff like:

• Homebrewed, sketchy SSO tooling and config files
• No centralized identity—I was a different person in every cloud account
• Mysterious logouts, redirects, and missing project context within the cloud console
• Account organization features that were “bolted-on” rather than designed the right way from the beginning

In contrast, I recently shared a Twitter thread about how shockingly right Google Cloud gets identity and environments. It’s probably my favorite thing about Google Cloud so far, and so in this post I want to expand on what I’ve learned. If you’re searching for a better way to access and organize your cloud, let me make you one of today’s lucky 10,000.

Nine things to love about Google Cloud identity and environments

1. You are YOU!
Every user is just a Google account (personal or corporate) that works across projects. For beginners, this lowers the barrier to entry and makes cloud feel like an extension of things you already know. For experts, it reduces the friction of having to juggle a bunch of unrelated identities. I love that you can permit any Google account into a cloud project as a collaborator—even a contributor from outside your organization! 

2. No non-IAM root accounts
Google Cloud has been designed from the ground up to avoid the chicken/egg problem of requiring a manually configured superuser that sits outside the rest of the identity management infrastructure. In the Google world, humans use Google accounts, and services use IAM-based service accounts —it’s as straightforward as that. (Even non-Google services can be IAM—yay, workload identity federation!)  

3. Project discovery for humans
Project, folder, and organization discovery are baked into the console, like browsing a file system scoped to your access level. This hardly even feels like a feature, it’s so subtle and yet absolutely fundamental. But once you see it, you can’t imagine going back to a world where environments exist in a vacuum with no contextual awareness of each other. 

The hierarchical organization model also means that project-per-application-per-environment best practices are the path of least resistance; if anything, I’ve erred on the side of setting up *too many* logical groupings. It’s just too much fun to play with projects and folders!

4. Billing that protects you from yourself
The project context gives you a logical container for the cost of the resources contained within it. My favorite part of this is that your billing entity is managed separately from the project itself. So you can delete a project and feel sure that all associated resources are gone and no longer racking up charges … without also trashing your ability to pay for future projects you might spin up. 

(Related: the free tier does not charge you money unless you click a big button that basically says “YES, IT’S OK TO CHARGE ME MONEY.” This guarantee, combined with the familiarity of Google Accounts for access, are the main reasons I now recommend Google Cloud to beginners in my network who are looking for a safe place to learn and explore cloud.)

5. Organizational structure != billing structure
For organizations, billing is decoupled from the organization root. So permissions inheritance is a separate design decision from chargeback, as it should be. This keeps your Google Cloud footprint from converging toward Conway’s Law.

6. SSO that just works
Want to use the CLI? You get SSO out of the box with your Google Account—no corporate organization required, and no manual shuffling with config files and access keys. Or, better yet, you can use Cloud Shell to run gcloud commands right in your browser, even (especially?) on the docs pages. (Random trivia: I think Cloud Shell is the only native cloud service that has the same name across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud–but Google’s version has been around the longest and as far as I can tell is the most fully-featured.) 

7. One group to rule them all
Remember how user entities are just Google accounts? Guess what: you can use Google Groups to manage group access to IAM roles! That’s right: one set of users with permissions across docs, email, and cloud. It’s one reason why Google Workspace makes sense as a core piece of Google Cloud; it really does function like just another cloud service from an identity standpoint. 

8. Never lose your place
In other clouds, I’ve experienced a problem I call the Timeout of Doom: when your console session expires, you’re left on a generic error screen and it’s up to you to figure out how to rebuild your context from scratch–starting with remembering what account you used in the first place. Imagine my delight to realize that reaching your Google Cloud console is as easy as bookmarking a single URL. console.cloud.google.com works and remembers who you are (or, at least, suggests the set of people you might be)—no mystery logouts or redirects.

9. Progressive complexity FTW
In my experience it’s been common for cloud providers to design most of their account features for organizations: if you’re an independent developer, you get more exposure to dangerous bills, less access to helpful SSO features, and generally must fend for yourself in a world that wasn’t really created with you in mind.

I love that Google Cloud has found a way to work with enterprises while still maintaining their roots as a cloud that developers love to use. Sign in with your personal Google account, attach it to an organization when-and-if you’re ready, and in the meantime you get the same thoughtfulness around SSO and billing as the giant shop down the street. 

I’m not going to tell you my experience has been seamless; there are footguns here (every Google Workspace integration creates a new project?), and I’m still learning. But it’s that “intentionality” thing again. The Google Cloud identity and environment experience feels like it was designed, not just accreted; there’s an elegant simplicity to it that makes cloud feel fresh and exciting to me all over again. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

In the meantime, I highly encourage you to do what I did and spin up a free trial to try things out for yourself. Then hit me up on Twitter with your favorite Google Cloud identity or environment feature!