Security profile group overview

A security profile group is a container for security profiles. A firewall policy rule references a security profile group to enable Layer 7 inspection, such as the URL filtering service and the intrusion detection and prevention service, on your network.

This document provides a detailed overview of security profile groups and their capabilities.

Specifications

  • A security profile group is an organizational level resource.

  • In a security profile group, you can add security profiles of types url-filtering or threat-prevention in any order.

A security profile group can only contain one security profile of each type. If you want to add two profiles, they must be of different types. For example, if you add a security profile of type url-filtering, you can add a second profile of type threat-prevention to scan the traffic in addition to filtering it.

  • Each security profile group is uniquely identified by a URL with the following elements:

    • Organization ID: ID of the organization.
    • Location: scope of the security profile group. Location is always set to global.
    • Name: security profile group name in the following format:
      • A string 1-63 characters long
      • Includes only alphanumeric characters or hyphens (-)
      • Must not start with a number

    To construct a unique URL identifier for a security profile group, use the following format:

    organization/ORGANIZATION_ID/locations/LOCATION/securityProfileGroups/SECURITY_PROFILE_GROUP_NAME

    For example, a global security profile group example-security-profile-group in organization 2345678432 has the following unique identifier:

    organization/2345678432/locations/global/securityProfileGroups/example-security-profile-group

  • To perform Layer 7 inspection of the network traffic, a firewall policy rule must contain the name of the security profile group to be used by the firewall endpoint.

  • Security profile groups apply to firewall policies only when you add a firewall policy rule with action apply_security_profile_group. You can configure security profile groups in hierarchical firewall policy rules and global network firewall policy rules.

  • The firewall policy rule applies to incoming and outgoing traffic of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network. The matched traffic is redirected to the firewall endpoint along with the configured security profile group name. The firewall endpoint uses the security profiles specified in the security profile group to inspect domain and server name indication (SNI) information, scan packets for threats, and apply configured actions.

    The firewall endpoint executes the URL filtering security profile first and then runs the threat prevention security profile. However, if the endpoint detects a possible threat in the HTTP(S) message header, it can use the intrusion detection and prevention service first to evaluate and block the traffic as needed. The traffic that is evaluated and not blocked by intrusion detection and prevention service is then processed by the URL filtering service.

    To learn more about how to configure the URL filtering service, see Configure the URL filtering service.

    To learn more about how to configure threat prevention, see Configure intrusion detection and prevention service.

  • Each security profile group must have an associated project ID. The associated project is used for quotas and access restrictions on security profile group resources. If you authenticate your service account by using the gcloud auth activate-service-account command, you can associate your service account with the security profile group. To learn more about how to create a profile group, see Create a security profile group.

Identity and Access Management roles

Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles govern the following security profile group actions:

  • Creating a security profile group in an organization
  • Modifying or deleting a security profile group
  • Viewing details of a security profile group
  • Viewing a list of security profile groups in an organization
  • Using a security profile group in a firewall policy rule

The following table describes the roles that are necessary for each step.

Ability Necessary role
Create a security profile group Security Profile Admin (roles/networksecurity.securityProfileAdmin) and Compute Network Admin (roles/compute.networkAdmin) roles on the organization where the security profile group is created.
Modify a security profile group Security Profile Admin (roles/networksecurity.securityProfileAdmin) and Compute Network Admin (roles/compute.networkAdmin) roles on the organization where the security profile group is created.
View details about the security profile group in an organization Any of the following roles for the organization:
Security Profile Admin (roles/networksecurity.securityProfileAdmin)
Compute Network Admin (roles/compute.networkAdmin)
Compute Network User (roles/compute.networkUser)
Compute Network Viewer (roles/compute.networkViewer)
View all of the security profile groups in an organization Any of the following roles for the organization:
Security Profile Admin (roles/networksecurity.securityProfileAdmin)
Compute Network Admin (roles/compute.networkAdmin)
Compute Network User (roles/compute.networkUser)
Compute Network Viewer (roles/compute.networkViewer)
Use a security profile group in a firewall policy rule Any of the following roles for the organization:
Security Profile Admin (roles/networksecurity.securityProfileAdmin)
Compute Network Admin (roles/compute.networkAdmin)
Compute Network User (roles/compute.networkUser)

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