gcloud beta topic client-certificate

NAME
gcloud beta topic client-certificate - client certificate authorization supplementary help
DESCRIPTION
(BETA) Client certificate authorization supplementary help.

Device Certificate Authorization (DCA) enables Context-aware access to identify devices by their X.509 certificates. DCA for Google Cloud APIs is the second in a series of releases that provides administrators the capability to protect access to their Google Cloud resources with device certificates. This feature builds on top of the existing Context-aware access suite (Endpoint Verification, Access Context Manager, and VPC Service Controls) and ensures that only users on trusted devices with a Google-generated certificate are able to access Google Cloud APIs. This provides a stronger signal of device identity (device certificate verification), and protects users from credential theft to accidental loss by only granting access when credentials and the original device certificate are presented.

To use this feature, organizations can follow the instructions below to install an endpoint verification agent to devices:

  • Automatically deploy endpoint verification (https://support.google.com/a/answer/9007320#)
    • Via Chrome Policy for the extension
    • 3rd party image/software distribution tools for the Native Helper on macOS and Windows
  • Let users install endpoint verification themselves from the Chrome Webstore (https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9018161#install)
    • Users would also be prompted to install the Native Helper as well
For a greater level of security, operating system key stores can be used to store client certificate objects. This feature is enabled by using enterprise-certificate-proxy.

enterprise-certificate-proxy can be installed by running $ gcloud components install enterprise-certificate-proxy.

In order to use enterprise-certificate-proxy it must first be configured. By default the configuration should be written to ~/.config/gcloud/certificate_config.json.

The enterprise-certificate-proxy schema is documented on the GitHub project page. Each operating system that gcloud supports uses a different key store. The certificate_config may contain multiple OS configurations.

Provisioning the key stores is not in scope for this document.

Run $ gcloud config set context_aware/use_client_certificate True so that the gcloud CLI will load the certificate and send it to services. Some services do not support client certificate authorization yet. When the gcloud CLI sends requests to such services, the client certificate will be ignored.

The following is the list of services which do NOT support client certificate authorization in the installed version of the gcloud CLI.

SERVICE VERSION NOTES
--- --- ---
baremetalsolution v1
baremetalsolution v2
cloudshell v1
cloudshell v1alpha1
datafusion v1beta1
domains v1
domains v1alpha2
domains v1beta1
edgecontainer v1
edgecontainer v1alpha
edgecontainer v1beta
edgenetwork v1
edgenetwork v1alpha1
ids v1
networksecurity v1
networksecurity v1alpha1
networksecurity v1beta1
networkservices v1
networkservices v1alpha1
networkservices v1beta1
policytroubleshooter v1
policytroubleshooter v1beta
policytroubleshooter v2alpha1
policytroubleshooter v3
policytroubleshooter v3alpha
policytroubleshooter v3beta
publicca v1
publicca v1alpha1
publicca v1beta1
--- --- ---
See https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/topic/client-certificate for the support list for the latest version of the gcloud CLI. Please upgrade the gcloud command-line tool if necessary.

Note: iap_tunnel is a special service gcloud CLI uses to create the IAP tunnel. For example, gcloud compute start-iap-tunnel can start a tunnel to Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy through which another process can create a connection (e.g. SSH, RDP) to a Google Compute Engine instance. Client certificate authorization is supported in tunnel creation.

NOTES
This command is currently in beta and might change without notice. These variants are also available:
gcloud topic client-certificate
gcloud alpha topic client-certificate