Enable certificate-based access for VMs

This page describes how to enable certificate-based access (CBA) for your Google Cloud VMs. You can use CBA to secure access from trusted devices to Google Cloud VMs.

Overview

CBA for VMs uses the Google Cloud context-aware access feature to secure access using Mutual TLS (mTLS). Following are the main components that you work with to enable and use CBA for VMs:

  • Access Context Manager: Lets you create access levels that require certificates when determining access to web applications.
  • Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP): IAP TCP forwarding lets you establish an encrypted tunnel over which you can forward SSH, RDP, and other traffic to VM instances. In addition, an IAP policy provides you with fine-grained control over which users are allowed to establish tunnels to specific VM instances and what access conditions the users must meet to use such tunnels.
  • Chrome Enterprise Policy: Provides mutual authentication (mTLS) between users and VMs when using the Chrome browser.
  • Google Cloud CLI: Provides mutual authentication (mTLS) between users and VMs when using the gcloud CLI.

Before you begin

Ensure that you created CBA access levels for your Google Cloud project.

Grant roles for accessing VMs through IAP TCP forwarding

You must grant the appropriate Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles on a project to let users or user groups use IAP TCP forwarding to access VMs.

The following table shows the predefined roles that you need to grant to trusted administrators for TCP forwarding and related tasks.

Task Roles More information
TCP forwarding IAP-secured Tunnel User (roles/iap.tunnelResourceAccessor) Grant access to all VM instances in a project or Grant access to a specific VM
SSH access Compute Instance Admin (v1) (roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1)
OS Login (Recommended) Various Configuring OS Login roles on user accounts
Use a service account Service Account User (roles/iam.serviceAccountUser) The serviceAccountUser role

For more information about granting roles for IAP TCP forwarding, see Grant roles for IAP TCP forwarding.

Configure certificate-based access to a VM

Although IAP-TCP lets you grant access to all VM instances in a project, you must configure certificate-based access for each individual VM instance.

To grant a user or user group certificate-based access to a VM, grant the roles/iap.tunnelResourceAccessor role on the VM instance. The other roles can be granted on the project.

Console

  1. Open the IAP Admin page, and then select the SSH and TCP Resources tab.

    Go to the IAP page

  2. Select the VM instances that you want to configure. Click Show info panel if the info panel is not visible.

  3. Click Add principal and configure the following:

    • New principals: Specify the user or user group that you want to grant access to.
    • Select a role: Select Cloud IAP > IAP-Secured Tunnel User.

  4. Click Add IAM condition and configure a condition:

    • Title: Enter a name for the condition.
    • Condition Builder: Select Access level from the Condition Type drop-down, and then select the certificate-based access level created earlier.

  5. Click Save.

API

To configure certificate-based access to a VM, modify your application's policy.json file.

See Managing access to IAP-secured resources for more information about using the IAM API to manage access policies.

  1. Export the following variables.

    export IAP_BASE_URL=https://iap.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_NUMBER/iap_tunnel
# Replace POLICY_FILE.JSON with the name of JSON file to use for setIamPolicy
export JSON_NEW_POLICY=POLICY_FILE.JSON

  2. Get the IAM policy for the Compute Engine instance using the getIamPolicy method. The empty data bit at the end turns the curl request into POST instead of GET.

    curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
     ${IAP_BASE_URL}/zones/ZONE_NAME/instances/INSTANCE_ID or INSTANCE_NAME:getIamPolicy \
     -d ''

  3. Grant the iap.tunnelResourceAccessor role and certificate-based access to your principals by modifying the IAM policy JSON file.

    Following is an example of a policy.json file that grants the iap.tunnelResourceAccessor role to a group of VM instance admins, giving them certificate-based access to IAP-secured tunnel resources.

    Note that if a principal has the Owner role, they have permission to use IAP for TCP forwarding.

    {
  "policy": {
    "bindings": [
      {
        "role": "roles/iap.tunnelResourceAccessor",
        "members": ["group:instance-admins@example.com"],
        "condition": {
          "expression": "\"accessPolicies/POLICY_NAME/accessLevels/CERTIFICATE_BASED_ACCESS_LEVEL_NAME\" in request.auth.access_levels,
          "title": "CERTIFICATE_BASED_CONDITION_NAME"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

    To find a policy name, call the accessPolicies.list method.

    GET https://accesscontextmanager.googleapis.com/v1/accessPolicies

  4. Set your new policy.json file using the setIamPolicy method.

    curl -i -H "Content-Type:application/json" \
          -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" \
          ${IAP_BASE_URL}/zones/ZONE_NAME/instances/INSTANCE_ID or INSTANCE_NAME:setIamPolicy \
          -d @${JSON_NEW_POLICY}

Access VMs using client certificates

To access VMs using client certificates, use one of the following methods.

Use client certificates on the Chrome browser to access VMs

  1. Configure the Chrome browser using one of the following options.
  2. In the Chrome browser, enter the following domain to access the Google Cloud console: console-secure.cloud.google.com.
  3. Access Google Cloud VMs using IAP tunneling.

Use client certificates on the gcloud CLI to access VMs

  1. Configure the gcloud CLI using one of the following methods.

  2. Access Google Cloud VMs using IAP tunneling.