Create a service perimeter

This page describes how to create a service perimeter.

Before you begin

• Read about configuring service perimeters.

• Read about management of VPC networks in service perimeters.

• Read about granting access to VPC Service Controls.

• If you want to configure external access to your protected services when you create your perimeter, create one or more access levels before you create the perimeter.

Create a service perimeter

Note: Service perimeters cannot contain projects from different organizations.

This section describes how to create a service perimeter, add projects or VPC networks to the perimeter, and protect services.

When you create a service perimeter, you can optionally allow access to protected services from outside the perimeter, and specify what services are accessible to other services and users inside the perimeter. If preferred, you can configure these settings after you create a perimeter.

After you create a service perimeter or update an existing service perimeter, it can take up to 30 minutes for the changes to propagate and take effect. During this time, the perimeter might block requests with the following error message: Error 403: Request is prohibited by organization's policy.

Console

1. In the Google Cloud console navigation menu, click Security, and then click VPC Service Controls.

   Go to VPC Service Controls

2. If you are prompted, select your organization, folder, or project.

3. Select an existing access policy or create a new access policy. Make sure that the access policy scope includes all projects and VPC networks that you want to add to the perimeter.

4. On the VPC Service Controls page, select a perimeter enforcement mode. By default, Enforced mode is selected. If you want to create a dry run perimeter, click Dry run mode.

   Enforced perimeters actively prevent access to protected services. Dry run perimeters log violations of the perimeter as though services were protected, but do not prevent access to those services. For more information about the enforced and dry run modes, read about service perimeters.

5. Click New perimeter.

6. On the Create a service perimeter page, in the Title field, enter a name for the perimeter.

   A perimeter name can have a maximum length of 50 characters, must start with a letter, and can contain only ASCII Latin letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), or underscores (_). The perimeter name is case sensitive and must be unique within an access policy.

7. Optional: In the Description field, enter a description for the perimeter.

8. For Perimeter type, select Regular.

9. For Enforcement mode, select a perimeter enforcement mode. The available options are Dry run and Enforced.

10. Click Continue.

11. To add projects or VPC networks that you want to secure within the perimeter, do the following:

    1. To add projects to the perimeter, click Add projects.

       1. In the Add projects pane, select the projects that you want to protect.

       2. Click Add selected projects. The added projects appear in the Projects section.

    2. To add VPC networks to the perimeter, click Add networks.

       1. From the list of projects, click the project that contains the VPC networks.

       2. In the Add VPC networks pane, select the VPC networks that you want to protect.

       3. Click Add selected networks. The added networks appear in the VPC networks section.

    3. Click Continue.

12. To select the services that you want to secure within the perimeter, do the following:

    1. In the Restricted services pane, click Add services.

    2. In the Add services pane, select the services that you want to protect.

       Note: We recommend that you restrict all services when you create a perimeter to mitigate the risk of data exfiltration from Google Cloud services.

    3. Click Add selected services.

    4. Click Continue.

13. Optional: If you want to define what services are accessible from network endpoints inside a perimeter, in the VPC accessible services pane, select one of the available options:

    • All services: This option allows all the Google Cloud services.

    • No services: This option doesn't allow any of the Google Cloud services.

    • All restricted services: This option allows only the Google Cloud services that you have protected in this perimeter.

    • Selected services: This option allows only the Google Cloud services that you have selected.

      1. Click Add services.

      2. In the Add services pane, select the services that you want to allow.

      3. Click Add selected services.

      4. To additionally include all the restricted services that the perimeter protects to the selected services, click the Include all restricted services toggle to the on position.

      5. Click Continue.

    You can also add accessible services after a perimeter has been created.

    For more information, see VPC accessible services.

14. Optional: To allow access to protected resources from outside the perimeter by using access levels, do the following:

    1. In the Access levels pane, click Add access levels.

       You can also add access levels after a perimeter has been created.

    2. Select the checkboxes corresponding to the access levels that you want to apply to the perimeter.

    3. Click Add selected access levels.

    4. Click Continue.

15. To allow access to resources within a perimeter from API clients outside the perimeter, do the following:

    1. In the Ingress rules pane, click Add an ingress rule.

    2. In the Title field, enter a title for the ingress rule.

    3. In the From section, specify the sources from outside the perimeter that require access. You can specify projects, access levels, and VPC networks as sources.

    4. In the To section, specify the resources within the perimeter that the sources can access.

    5. Click Continue.

    For the list of ingress rule attributes, see Ingress rules reference.

    Note: Access levels and ingress rules work together to control incoming traffic to a perimeter. A request is allowed if it satisfies the conditions of either the access level or the ingress rule.

16. To allow access that involves an API client or resources within the perimeter to resources outside a perimeter, do the following:

    1. In the Egress rules pane, click Add an egress rule.

    2. In the Title field, enter a title for the egress rule.

    3. In the From section, specify the sources from within the perimeter that require access.

    4. In the To section, specify the resources outside the perimeter that the sources can access.

    For the list of egress rule attributes, see Egress rules reference.

17. Click Create.

gcloud

To create a new perimeter in enforced mode, use the gcloud access-context-manager perimeters create command.

gcloud access-context-manager perimeters create NAME \
  --title=TITLE \
  --resources=RESOURCES \
  --restricted-services=RESTRICTED-SERVICES \
  --ingress-policies=INGRESS-FILENAME.yaml \
  --egress-policies=EGRESS-FILENAME.yaml \
  [--access-levels=LEVELS] \
  [--enable-vpc-accessible-services] \
  [--vpc-allowed-services=ACCESSIBLE-SERVICES] \
  --policy=POLICY_NAME

To create a new perimeter in dry run mode, use the gcloud access-context-manager perimeters dry-run create command.

gcloud access-context-manager perimeters dry-run create NAME \
  --perimeter-title=TITLE \
  --perimeter-type=TYPE \
  --perimeter-resources=RESOURCES \
  --perimeter-restricted-services=RESTRICTED-SERVICES \
  --perimeter-ingress-policies=INGRESS-FILENAME.yaml \
  --perimeter-egress-policies=EGRESS-FILENAME.yaml \
  [--perimeter-access-levels=LEVELS] \
  [--perimeter-enable-vpc-accessible-services] \
  [--perimeter-vpc-allowed-services=ACCESSIBLE-SERVICES] \
  --policy=POLICY_NAME

Replace the following:

• NAME is the name of the perimeter.

  A perimeter name can have a maximum length of 50 characters, must start with a letter, and can contain only ASCII Latin letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), or underscores (_). The perimeter name is case sensitive and must be unique within an access policy.

• TITLE is the human-readable title of the perimeter.

• TYPE is the type of the perimeter. For example, a "regular" perimeter or a "bridge" perimeter.

• RESOURCES is a comma-separated list of one or more project numbers or VPC network names. For example: projects/12345 or //compute.googleapis.com/projects/my-project/global/networks/vpc1. Only projects and VPC networks are allowed. Project format: projects/project_number. VPC format: //compute.googleapis.com/projects/project-id/global/networks/network_name. If you specify projects, only project numbers are supported. You cannot use the project name or ID.

• RESTRICTED-SERVICES is a comma-separated list of one or more services. For example: storage.googleapis.com or storage.googleapis.com,bigquery.googleapis.com.

  Note: We recommend you restrict all services when you create a perimeter to mitigate the risk of data exfiltration from Google Cloud services.

• INGRESS-FILENAME is a JSON or YAML file that contains the values of source, identity, project, and service attributes. For the list of ingress rule attributes, see Ingress rules reference.

• EGRESS-FILENAME is a JSON or YAML file that contains the values of identity, project, and service attributes. For the list of egress rule attributes, see Egress rules reference.

• POLICY_NAME is the numeric name of your organization's access policy. For example, 330193482019. You only need to include the policy name if you haven't set a default access policy.

Additional options:

• --access-levels or --perimeter-access-levels is required only if you want to add access levels when you create the perimeter. LEVELS is a comma-separated list of one or more access levels that you want to apply to the service perimeter.

  You can also add access levels after you create the perimeter.

• --enable-vpc-accessible-services and --vpc-allowed-services, or --perimeter-enable-vpc-accessible-services and --perimeter-vpc-allowed-services are required only if you want to add VPC accessible services when you create the perimeter. ACCESSIBLE-SERVICES is a comma-separated list of one or more services that you want to allow networks inside your perimeter to access. Access to any services that are not included in this list are prevented.

  You can only make a service accessible if you also protect it when configuring the perimeter.

  To quickly include all the services protected by a perimeter, specify RESTRICTED-SERVICES in the list for ACCESSIBLE-SERVICES. For example, --perimeter-vpc-allowed-services=RESTRICTED-SERVICES.

  You can also define VPC accessible services after you create the perimeter.

For example, the following command creates a new dry run mode perimeter named ProdPerimeter that includes projects example-project and example-project2, and restricts the Cloud Storage and BigQuery APIs.

gcloud access-context-manager perimeters \
  dry-run create ProdPerimeter --perimeter-title="Production Perimeter" \
  --perimeter-type="regular" \
  --perimeter-resources=projects/12345,projects/67890 \
  --perimeter-restricted-services=storage.googleapis.com,bigquery.googleapis.com \
  --perimeter-ingress-policies=ingress.yaml \
  --perimeter-egress-policies=egress.yaml \
  --policy=330193482019

API

To create a service perimeter, call accessPolicies.servicePerimeters.create.

 POST https://accesscontextmanager.googleapis.com/v1/accessPolicies/POLICY_NAME/servicePerimeters

Where:

• POLICY_NAME is the numeric name of your organization's access policy. For example, 330193482019.

Request body

The request body must include a ServicePerimeter resource that defines the service perimeter.

For the ServicePerimeter resource, specify PERIMETER_TYPE_REGULAR for perimeterType.

Note: We recommend that you restrict all services when you create a perimeter.

Dry Run Mode

The proposed perimeter must be included as the spec and useExplicitDryRunSpec set to true.

Response body

If successful, the response body for the call contains an Operation resource that provides details about the POST operation.

What's next

• Learn how to test the impact of a service perimeter using the dry run mode.
• Learn how to manage existing service perimeters.
• Learn how to troubleshoot common VPC Service Controls issues.
• Complete this codelab to learn how to protect projects and their services using VPC Service Controls.
• Learn how to set up and view the violation dashboard (Preview).