Free Practice Questions for Google Professional-Cloud-Security-Engineer Exam

Objective: Implement an encryption at-rest strategy that balances key management complexity and control for sensitive and non-sensitive data, ensuring FIPS 140-2 L1 compliance.

Solution: Use Google default encryption for non-sensitive data and Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) for sensitive data.

Steps:

Step 1: Store non-sensitive data using Google Cloud’s default encryption, which automatically encrypts data at rest without additional configuration.

Step 2: For sensitive data, use Cloud KMS to create and manage encryption keys.

Step 3: Configure key rotation policies for the keys managed by Cloud KMS to meet compliance requirements.

Step 4: Ensure that all data encryption keys used by Cloud KMS comply with FIPS 140-2 Level 1 standards.

By using Google default encryption for non-sensitive data and Cloud KMS for sensitive data, you can manage encryption efficiently while maintaining control over key residency and rotation for sensitive data.

To evaluate Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for PCI compliance and identify Google's inherent controls, you should review the "Google Cloud Platform: Customer Responsibility Matrix". This document provides detailed information about the shared responsibility model, outlining the security controls managed by Google and those that are the responsibility of the customer.

Steps to access and use the document:

Access the Document:

Go to the Google Cloud compliance resource center.

Locate the "Customer Responsibility Matrix" for PCI DSS compliance.

Review Inherent Controls:

The document lists various controls and specifies whether they are managed by Google, the customer, or both.

It covers different aspects such as infrastructure security, data protection, and compliance requirements.

Analyze PCI Compliance:

Use the matrix to understand which PCI DSS requirements are inherently addressed by Google Cloud.

Identify the controls you need to implement and manage as a customer to ensure full compliance.

By reviewing this document, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the inherent controls provided by Google Cloud and the responsibilities you must fulfill to achieve PCI compliance.

Google Cloud Compliance Documentation

PCI DSS Compliance on Google Cloud

The minimum length for passwords in Cloud Identity can be set to 8 characters. This aligns with common security best practices for password policies, ensuring a basic level of complexity and security.

Step-by-Step:

Access Admin Console: Log in to the Google Admin console.

Navigate to Security Settings: Go to Security > Password Management.

Set Minimum Length: Set the minimum length for passwords to 8 characters.

Save Changes: Save the settings and ensure that all user accounts adhere to the new policy.

Google Cloud Identity Security Settings

Password Policy Best Practices

Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) provides a way to control access to your web applications and resources running on Google Cloud. It works by verifying the identity of a user trying to access the application and supports multi-factor authentication (MFA). Cloud IAP can restrict access to users on the corporate network and also supports access over the internet securely.

Steps:

Enable Cloud IAP: In the Google Cloud Console, navigate to the IAP section and enable IAP for your web application.

Configure OAuth Consent Screen: Set up the OAuth consent screen to manage how users grant access.

Set Up Authentication: Use Google Identity Platform to manage users and enable two-factor authentication.

Add Users: Grant users access to the application by adding their identities in the IAP settings.

Objective: Optimize the usage of Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API to reduce costs.

Solution:

rowsLimit and bytesLimitPerFile: These parameters help in sampling data instead of scanning the entire dataset, thereby reducing the amount of data processed.

CloudStorageRegexFileSet: This feature allows you to specify a subset of files to be scanned using regular expressions, limiting the scope and volume of data scanned.

Steps:

Step 1: Set appropriate rowsLimit values for BigQuery data scans to sample rows instead of scanning entire tables.

Step 2: Set bytesLimitPerFile values for Cloud Storage buckets to limit the number of bytes scanned per file.

Step 3: Use CloudStorageRegexFileSet to specify the subset of files to be scanned based on patterns that match the filenames.

By combining these strategies, you effectively reduce the scope and volume of data processed by the DLP API, leading to cost savings.

Objective: Create a Service Account that can list Compute Engine instances in the project following Google-recommended practices.

Solution: Create a custom role and assign it to the Service Account.

Steps:

Step 1: Open the Google Cloud Console.

Step 2: Navigate to the IAM & Admin page and select "Roles".

Step 3: Click on "Create Role" and define a new role with a suitable name and description.

Step 4: Add the permission compute.instances.list to the custom role.

Step 5: Save the custom role.

Step 6: Go to the "Service Accounts" section.

Step 7: Create a new Service Account or select an existing one.

Step 8: Assign the newly created custom role to the Service Account.

By creating a custom role with the specific permission to list Compute Engine instances, you follow the principle of least privilege, which is a recommended security practice.

"Isolate VMs using service accounts when possible" "even though it is possible to uses tags for target filtering in this manner, we recommend that you use service accounts where possible. Target tags are not access-controlled and can be changed by someone with the instanceAdmin role while VMs are in service. Service accounts are access-controlled, meaning that a specific user must be explicitly authorized to use a service account. There can only be one service account per instance, whereas there can be multiple tags. Also, service accounts assigned to a VM can only be changed when the VM is stopped." https://cloud.google.com/solutions/best-practices-vpc-design#isolate-vms-service-accounts

Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK):

CMEK allows you to manage encryption keys using Cloud Key Management Service (KMS). This gives you control over the lifecycle of the keys, including rotation, destruction, and auditing.

Set up a Cloud KMS key ring and create encryption keys that will be used to protect your data in BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Storage.

Configure the services to use CMEK for encrypting data at rest, ensuring compliance with your organization's security policies.

Cloud External Key Manager (EKM):

Cloud EKM allows you to use keys managed by an external key management provider to encrypt data in Google Cloud services.

Integrate your external key management system with Google Cloud using supported protocols and APIs.

Configure your data warehouse services to use the external keys for encryption, ensuring that key management is handled outside of the Google Cloud environment.

Key Access Justifications:

Enable Key Access Justifications to provide visibility into why encryption keys are being accessed. This helps in monitoring and auditing key usage to ensure compliance and security.

Set up policies and logging to capture and review key access requests, providing insights into how and why keys are used.

Access Transparency and Approval:

Implement Access Transparency to gain visibility into Google’s access to your data and encryption keys.

Configure Access Approval to require explicit approval for Google support or engineering access to your data, adding an additional layer of security and control.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/scan-with-dlp

Cloud Data Loss Prevention API allows to detect and redact or remove sensitive data before the comments or reviews are published. Cloud DLP will read information from BigQuery, Cloud Storage or Datastore and scan it for sensitive data.

Objective: Identify the layers of the stack the customer shares responsibility for in a shared security responsibility model for IaaS.

Solution: Understand the shared responsibility model.

Network Security: Customers are responsible for configuring network security, such as setting up firewalls, managing VPCs, and ensuring secure network traffic.

Access Policies: Customers are responsible for managing access policies, including IAM roles and permissions, to ensure only authorized users can access resources.

In IaaS, the cloud provider is typically responsible for the underlying infrastructure, while the customer is responsible for securing their applications and data on the cloud.