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.

Forensics is the application of science to criminal and civil laws. It is a proven approach for gathering and processing evidence at a crime scene. An integral step in the forensics process is the isolation of the scene without contaminating or modifying the evidence. The isolation step prevents any further contamination or tampering with possible evidence. The same philosophy can be applied to the investigation of digital events.

In this post we will review methods, tactics and architecture designs to isolate an infected VM while still making it accessible to forensic tools. The goal is to allow access so that data and evidence can be captured while protecting other assets. There are many forensic tools for networking that can be used to analyze the captured traffic. This post does not cover these tools but rather how to configure GCP to capture live traffic in the most efficient and secured way. Once traffic is captured, customers can use whatever tools they prefer to run the analysis. More details about these tools and required agents can be found here and details about open source tooling that Google and others are developing are available here.

In cloud security context, when a VM shows signs of compromise, the most common immediate reaction is to take a snapshot, shut down the instance and relocate the image snapshot to an isolated environment, a method known as “dead analysis”. However, shutting down the instance will impede an important step in the investigation and digital forensics, as some important information in a buffer or the RAM may be lost. 

The other forensic approach is “live analysis”, in which the VM is kept on and evidence is gathered from the VM directly. Live forensics enables the imaging of RAM, bypasses most hard drives and software encryption, determines the cause of abnormal traffic, and is extremely useful when dealing with active network intrusions. This process is usually performed by forensic analysts. For example, if there is a good chance the malware resides only in memory then live forensics is, in some cases, the only way to capture and analyze the malware. In this method, in addition to disk and memory evidence, a forensic analysis can also capture live-network from data sent over the compromised VM network interfaces. Some of the benefits of collecting live networks are reconstruction and visualizing traffic flow in real-time, in particular during active network intrusions or attacks. 

In the cloud, a VM must be isolated when it becomes apparent that an incident has happened, in order to protect other VMs from being infected. Our Cloud Forensics 101 session covers the process and required artifacts, such as logs, that need to be collected for cloud forensics. 

What happens when your image is compromised

Let’s now assume that one of the VMs in your infrastructure has been compromised and alarms are coming from products such as GCP’s Cloud Security and Command Center, Chronicle backstory or your SIEM. 

An incident response plan consists of 3 phases: preparation (actions taken before an attack), detection (actions taken during an attack) and response (actions taken after an attack). During the detection phase, the Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) or threat analysts decide whether live acquisition analysis is required. If live forensics is required, for example when it is vital to acquire a VM’s RAM, then one of the first courses of action is to isolate and contain the VM from the rest of the world and connect the Forensics VPC to the VM for investigation. The forensics VPC resides in a forensics GCP project, it includes digital forensics tools to capture evidence from the VM such as SANS Investigative Forensics Toolkit – SIFT, The Sleuth Kit, Autopsy, Encase, FTK and alike. These tools are already installed, configured, tested and ready to use. The forensics project will also save and preserve evidence such as disk and memory images for forensic review.

We’ll cover two scenarios in this post, the first scenario is to isolate the image and connect the forensics VPC to the image for live acquisition. 

In the second scenario we will also capture live traffic from the isolated image for live network digital forensics. To capture live traffic from the infected VM, we will leverage the GCP Packet Mirroring service to duplicate all traffic going in and out of the VM and send it to a Forensics VPC for analysis. Network forensics analysis tools such as Palo Alto VM-Series for IDS, ExtraHop Reveal(x), CheckPoint CloudGuard, Arkime (formerly Moloch), Corelight are installed, configured and ready for deployment in the Forensics VPC, these tools will be used to analyze the duplicate network traffic. 

Isolating the infected VM from other resources and connecting the forensics VPC

As part of the Incident Response plan preparation phase, the CSIRT created a Google Cloud Forensics Project. Since the Forensics project will be used only when needed, it’s better to automate the creation of the project and its resources with a tool such as Terraform. It is important to grant access to this project only to individuals and groups who deal with incident response and forensics, such as CSIRT. As shown in figure 1, the Forensics project on the right includes its own VPC, non-overlapped subnet and VM images with pre-installed and pre-configured forensics tools. Internal load-balancer and instance-groups are also configured, we will use these resources to capture live traffic, as described later in this post.

In order to contain the spread of any malware or network activity, such as data exfiltration, we’ll isolate the VM with VPC firewall rules. The GCP VPC firewall is a distributed firewall that always enforces its rules, protecting the instances regardless of their configuration and operating systems. In other words, the compromised VM cannot override the firewall enforcement if its policies follow the principle of least privilege . Rules can be applied to all instances in the network, target network tags or service accounts.

Step 1 in the diagram above shows how an infected VM is isolated from the rest of the network by firewall rules that deny any ingress and egress traffic from any CIDR beside the forensics subnet CIDR. The infected VM is tagged with a unique network tag, for example “<image-name>_InfectedVM”, then firewalls rules are applied on the network tag. This ensures that the infected VM is isolated from the project and the Internet while enabling access to the VM via VPC peering which we’ll configure in step-2. You can learn more about VPC firewalls rules here.

In step 2, the VPC from the forensics project is peered with the VPC in the production project. When VPC peering is established routes are exchanged between the VPCs. By default, VPC peering exchanges all subnet routes, however, custom routes can also be filtered if required. At this point, the VM from the forensics project can communicate with the infected VM and start the live forensics analysis job using the pre-installed and pre-configured forensics tools.

Shared VPC is a network construct that allows you to connect resources from multiple projects, called service-projects, to a common VPC in a host-project. VPCs from different projects can securely communicate with each other via the hosted project network while centralizing the network administration. Figure 2 depicts Shared VPC topology, rather than using VPC peering, during step 2 the Forensics project is simply attached to the host project. After the attachment, the Shared VPC allows the forensics tools to communicate with the infected VMs.

Capturing live network traffic with Google Traffic Mirroring

If live network forensics is required, for example during active network intrusions, then the incoming and outgoing traffic needs to be duplicated and captured. While VPC Flow logs capture the networking metadata telemetry, this is not enough for live network forensics analysis. GCP Packet Mirroring clones the traffic of a specified instance in a VPC and forwards it to a specified internal load balancer which collects the mirrored traffic and sends it to an attached instance group. Packet mirroring captures all the traffic from the specified subnet, network tags, or instance name. 

Figure 3 depicts the steps that allow the compromised VM to communicate with the rest of the world (for example beaconing with C&C) while capturing all traffic for investigation in a peered VPC deployment.

Figure 4 depicts the steps that allow the compromised VM to communicate with the rest of the world while capturing all traffic for investigation in a shared VPC deployment.

We will use the Forensics’ project internal load balancer and the instance group VMs which include packet capture and analysis tools. Note that production and forensics networks must be in the same region. Detailed steps to configure packet mirroring are available on this page. 

If you are using a Shared VPC then check the Packet Mirroring configuration for Shared VPC for configuration details. Figure 4 depicts the packet mirroring flow in a shared VPC topology.

It is recommended to automate and periodically test the process to make sure that in case of an incident, the entire setup and Forensics toolchain can be quickly deployed. If after initial investigation a suspicious destination, such as a Command and Control [C&C] Server, has been identified, then the Packet Mirroring policy can be adjusted with a policy filter that only mirrors traffic from that C&C server IP address.

An incident management plan must be in place for companies using cloud services, and this plan should also include the option of using live acquisition when necessary. design and preparation for forensics acquisition allows the company to build the infrastructure that can be deployed and connected to the appropriate VM automatically. The architectures described in this post can help the process of collecting and preserving vital evidence for the forensic process, while the incident response team resolves the incident.

In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

Today, we are putting the power of Google’s insights and intelligence in the hands of risk, fraud, and security teams everywhere. We are pleased to announce the general availability of reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention, a new product that uses Google’s own fraud models, machine learning, and intelligence from protecting more than 6 million websites to help stop payment fraud.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention can help protect payment transactions by identifying targeted manual attacks and large-scale fraud attempts. It automatically trains fraud models based on behavior and transaction data to identify events that are likely fraudulent and could cause a dispute or chargeback if accepted. 

When threat actors are identified and blocked on any site in the reCAPTCHA network, the intelligence is made available to help protect other organizations from those same attackers. Organizations can then use the scores to send the transaction for manual review or directly block suspicious transactions, drive increased trust in their legitimate transactions, reduce the amount of friction for good users, and reduce erroneous rejection rates.

“Being a safe and trusted place to give and receive help is our top priority. We are constantly innovating, refining and enhancing our fraud defenses and Google’s reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention adds another layer of industry-leading protection for our users. Combining Google’s rich security expertise with GoFundMe’s focus on fraud prevention is already showing promising results as we strive to keep our platform the safest place to give online,” said Matthew Murray, director of risk, GoFundMe.

According to data obtained from our customers using reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention in private Preview, the new solution can help drive comprehensive value for organizations by:

• Reducing fraud losses: Get behavior modeling (not just mouse movements), stop financial damage created by account takeovers (ATOs), and connect fraud and abuse intelligence across your site and application.
• Increasing legitimate sales: Fraud Prevention can help businesses increase their revenue by providing insights to understand who good users are, who may otherwise be caught in an overly aggressive, customer restrictive fraud model.*

These benefits  are enabled for organizations by:

• Preventing advanced attacks: Stopping sophisticated attacks in an environment where attackers use cloud fraud infrastructure, and data leaks, virtual cards and VPN usage are on the rise
• Increasing trust in good transactions: Focus on good approval rates through a unique combination of supervised and unsupervised models
• Improving customer experience: By preventing fraudulent transactions with zero user friction, Fraud Prevention can help businesses protect legitimate users and increase customer retention

Our customers have used these new capabilities in preview in customer experiences that include online checkouts and payment transactions. Fraud Prevention has been used by merchants and payment processors to block millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions in a frictionless way. 

reCAPTCHA Enterprise provides a comprehensive online fraud detection platform that helps prevent fraudulent, spammy, and abusive digital client activity across your web and application footprint. This platform includes Account Defender, which protects users from account takeovers (ATO), frictionless bot management capabilities, and password leak detection to identify compromised accounts. With an additional API call for Fraud Prevention, organizations can leverage a comprehensive solution to secure financial transactions along with core reCAPTCHA Enterprise capabilities. 

To get started, organizations can install a score-based site key on each part of the payment user flow front end and send transaction data when a purchase occurs. This site key helps train site-specific fraud models and start returning fraud scores for each transaction. 

Ready to put reCAPTCHA Enterprise Fraud Prevention to work? Contact our fraud specialists or your customer success CSM team and sign up with the free tier. You learn more about these new capabilities in reCAPTCHA Enterprise in our product documentation. You can also register for our webinar where our experts will be discussing this capability in great detail on June 1, 2023. 

Coming up at our Security Summit on June 13-14, you can hear how reCAPTCHA Enterprise helped GoFundMe secure their donors from fraud. Sign up here for free Security Summit registration.