This page recommends security best practices that you should keep in mind when using IAM.
This page is designed for users who are proficient with IAM. If you are just starting out with IAM, these instructions will not teach you how to use it; instead, new users should start with the IAM Quickstart.
Least privilege
❑
Basic roles include thousands of permissions across all Google Cloud services. In production
environments, do not grant basic roles unless there is no alternative. Instead, grant the most
limited predefined roles or
custom roles that meet your needs.
If you need to replace a basic role, you can use role recommendations to determine which roles to grant instead. You can also use the Policy Simulator to ensure that changing the role won't affect the principal's access. It might be appropriate to grant basic roles in the following cases:
|
❑
Treat each component of your application as a separate trust boundary. If you
have multiple services that require different permissions, create a separate service account
for each of the services, then grant only the required permissions to each
service account.
|
❑
Remember that the allow policies for child resources inherit from the allow
policies for their parent resources. For example, if the allow policy for a
project grants a user the ability to administer Compute Engine virtual machine
(VM) instances, then the user can administer any Compute Engine VM in
that project, regardless of the allow policy you set on each VM.
|
❑
Grant roles at the smallest scope needed. For example, if a user only needs
access to publish Pub/Sub topics, grant the Publisher role to the user for that
topic.
|
❑
Specify which principals can
act as service accounts.
Users who are granted the Service Account User role for a service account can
access all the resources to which the service account has access. Therefore, be
cautious when granting the Service Account User role to a user.
|
❑
Specify who has access to create and manage service accounts in your project.
|
❑
Granting the
Project IAM
Admin and Folder IAM Admin predefined roles will allow access to modify
allow policies without also allowing direct read, write, and administrative
access to all resources.
Granting the Owner ( roles/owner ) role to a principal will allow them to access and
modify almost all resources, including modifying allow policies. This amount
of privilege is potentially risky. Grant the Owner role only when (nearly)
universal access is required.
|
❑
Use conditional role bindings
to let access expire automatically, and consider
granting privileged access only on a just-in-time basis.
|
Service accounts
❑
Adopt best practices for
working with service accounts. Ensure that service accounts have limited
privileges, and protect against potential security threats.
|
❑
Do not delete service accounts that are in use by running instances. This could
result in all or parts of your application to fail if you have not transitioned
to using an alternative service account first.
|
❑
Use the display name of a service account to keep track of what the service
account is used for and what permissions it needs.
|
Service account keys
❑
Avoid using service account keys if another option is
available.
Service account keys are a security risk if not managed correctly. You should
choose a more secure alternative to service account keys
whenever possible. If you must authenticate with a service account key, you are responsible for the
security of the private key and for other operations described by
Best practices for managing service account keys.
If you are prevented from creating a service account key, service account key creation might
be disabled for your organization. For more information, see
Managing secure-by-default organization resources.
|
❑
Rotate your service account keys using the
IAM service account API.
You can rotate a key by creating a new key, switching
applications to use the new key, disabling the old key, and then deleting the
old key when you are sure that it is no longer needed.
|
❑
Implement
processes to manage user-managed service account keys.
|
❑
Be careful not to confuse encryption keys with service account keys. Encryption
keys are typically used to encrypt data and service account keys are used for
secure access to Google Cloud APIs.
|
❑
Don't check in the service account keys into the source code or leave them in
the Downloads directory.
|
Auditing
❑
Use logs from Cloud Audit Logs to
regularly audit changes to your allow policy.
|
❑
Export audit logs to Cloud Storage
to store your logs for long periods of time.
|
❑
Audit who has the ability to change your allow policies on your projects.
|
❑
Manage access to logs using
Logging roles.
|
❑
Apply the same access policies to the Google Cloud resource that you use
to route logs as applied to the Logs Explorer.
|
❑
Use logs from Cloud Audit Logs to regularly audit access to service
account keys.
|
Policy management
❑
If a principal needs access to all projects in your organization, grant roles to
the principal at the
organization level.
|
❑
Grant roles to a Google group instead of individual users when possible. It
is easier to update the members of a Google group than to update the principals
in your allow policies.
|