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

https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/organization-policy/restricting-domains#setting_the_organization_policy

The domain restriction constraint is a type of list constraint. Google Workspace customer IDs can be added and removed from the allowed_values list of a domain restriction constraint. The domain restriction constraint does not support denying values, and an organization policy can't be saved with IDs in the denied_values list. All domains associated with a Google Workspace account listed in the allowed_values will be allowed by the organization policy. All other domains will be denied by the organization policy.

To enforce private connectivity between on-premises hosts and Google Cloud APIs while optimizing for cost and operational efficiency, using a dedicated or Partner Interconnect is the best solution. This setup ensures a reliable, high-bandwidth connection with private IP addressing.

Choose Interconnect Type: Decide between Dedicated Interconnect and Partner Interconnect based on your bandwidth needs and proximity to Google Cloud locations.

Set Up Interconnect:

For Dedicated Interconnect, order circuits through the Google Cloud Console.

For Partner Interconnect, select a supported service provider and order the connection through them.

Configure VPC and Private Google Access:

In your VPC, enable Private Google Access to allow on-premises hosts to access Google APIs privately.

Go to "VPC network" -> "Private Google Access" and enable it for your subnets.

Establish Connectivity: Work with your network team and (if applicable) your Partner Interconnect provider to set up the physical and logical connections.

Test Connectivity: Verify that on-premises hosts can reach Google Cloud services using private IP addresses.

https://cloud.google.com/access-transparency Access approval Explicitly approve access to your data or configurations on Google Cloud. Access Approval requests, when combined with Access Transparency logs, can be used to audit an end-to-end chain from support ticket to access request to approval, to eventual access.

Enable VPC Service Controls:

VPC Service Controls help mitigate the risk of data exfiltration by allowing you to define a security perimeter around GCP resources.

Set up a service perimeter around your BigQuery project to restrict data access to within the defined perimeter.

Create Access Levels:

In the Google Cloud Console, navigate to the Access Context Manager.

Define access levels based on IP address conditions, specifying the authorized source IP addresses that are allowed to access your BigQuery resources.

These access levels are used to enforce policies that restrict who can access your sensitive data based on their IP addresses.

Apply Service Perimeter with Access Levels:

Apply the created access levels to the service perimeter to ensure that only requests originating from the specified IP addresses are able to access BigQuery tables.

This setup ensures that the sensitive PII data is not accessible from unauthorized IP addresses, reducing the risk of data exfiltration.

Objective: Ensure that a Cloud Storage bucket in Project A can only be readable from Project B and prevent data access or copying to Cloud Storage buckets outside the network, even with correct credentials.

Solution: Use VPC Service Controls to create a security perimeter.

Steps:

Step 1: Open the Google Cloud Console.

Step 2: Navigate to the VPC Service Controls page.

Step 3: Create a new service perimeter.

Step 4: Add Project A and Project B to the service perimeter.

Step 5: Include Cloud Storage service in the perimeter configuration.

Step 6: Define access levels to ensure that only resources within the perimeter can access the Cloud Storage bucket.

By setting up a VPC Service Controls perimeter, you can enforce security boundaries that restrict data access and movement to within defined projects, providing an extra layer of protection beyond IAM permissions.

To meet the requirements of rotating the master key every 45 days, achieving FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validation, and ensuring the master key is stored redundantly in multiple US regions, you should use Customer-managed encryption keys with Cloud HSM. Here’s how:

Set Up Cloud HSM:

Deploy Cloud HSM in your Google Cloud environment. Cloud HSM provides a hardware-based key management solution that meets FIPS 140-2 Level 3 compliance.

Create and Manage Keys:

Create your encryption keys in Cloud HSM. These keys can be managed and rotated per your policy requirements.

Key Rotation:

Set up a key rotation schedule to rotate the master key every 45 days. Cloud HSM allows you to automate this process.

Geographic Redundancy:

Ensure that your Cloud HSM configuration spans multiple regions within the US to achieve redundancy. This will ensure that your keys are available even if a particular region experiences an outage.

Compliance:

Cloud HSM’s FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validation ensures that your encryption keys are managed in a secure and compliant manner.

Benefits:

Security and Compliance: Meets stringent compliance requirements.

Automated Management: Simplifies key management and rotation.

Redundancy: Ensures high availability of keys across multiple regions.

References

Cloud HSM Documentation

Key Management with Cloud KMS and Cloud HSM

To connect Compute Engine instances within a Google Cloud Platform project to workloads running in a dedicated server room that can only be accessed from within the private company network, you can use the following approaches:

Cloud VPN: Cloud VPN securely connects your on-premises network to your Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network through an IPsec VPN connection. This enables secure communication between your GCP instances and your on-premises workloads over the internet.

Cloud Interconnect: Cloud Interconnect provides direct physical connections between your on-premises network and Google's network. It offers higher bandwidth and lower latency compared to Cloud VPN, making it suitable for workloads that require fast and reliable connectivity.

Both Cloud VPN and Cloud Interconnect allow you to securely connect your on-premises environments to Google Cloud, ensuring that the workloads remain within the private company network.

References

Cloud VPN Overview

Cloud Interconnect Overview

The core requirements are: centralized, tamper-proof, long-term (seven years) immutable audit trails for administrative and data access activity.

Centralization: The current logging is fragmented. To centralize, you need to collect logs from across the organization. Cloud Logging sinks configured at the organization level are designed for this purpose. They allow you to route logs from all projects within an organization to a single destination.Extract Reference: "Aggregated exports allow you to export logs from multiple Google Cloud projects, folders, or your entire organization. An aggregated export can include all logs from all included resources, or you can use queries to include only specific logs." (Google Cloud documentation: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/export/aggregated_exports)

Long-Term Storage (Seven Years): Cloud Logging buckets have default retention periods (e.g., 30 days for Data Access logs, 400 days for Admin Activity logs) which are not sufficient for a seven-year requirement. Cloud Storage is ideal for long-term archival.Extract Reference: "Cloud Storage is a highly scalable and durable object storage service suitable for archiving large volumes of data for extended periods." (Google Cloud documentation, general overview of Cloud Storage features)

Tamper-Proof / Immutability: This is a critical requirement for audit trails in financial services under strict regulatory frameworks. Cloud Storage's "object retention lock" feature provides immutability. Once an object retention lock is set on a bucket, objects within that bucket cannot be deleted or overwritten for a specified duration, ensuring data integrity for compliance purposes.Extract Reference: "Object Retention Lock helps you meet compliance requirements by preventing data from being deleted or modified for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. This feature satisfies SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511(c), and CFTC Regulation 1.31(c)-(d) requirements." (Google Cloud documentation: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/bucket-lock)

Let's evaluate the other options:

A. Implement Pub/Sub to stream all audit logs from each project in real-time to an external SIEM: While Pub/Sub can centralize real-time streaming to a SIEM, the solution described does not inherently guarantee tamper-proof storage or 7-year immutability within Google Cloud. The SIEM itself would need to provide those capabilities, which is outside the scope of Google Cloud's direct offering for this specific requirement.

C. Enable Security Command Center across the organization: Security Command Center (SCC) provides centralized visibility into security posture, threats, and compliance. However, SCC is a security management and monitoring platform; it does not serve as the primary long-term, immutable storage for raw audit logs. It consumes information from logs but doesn't store them in a way that meets the 7-year immutable archival requirement.

D. Individually configure Cloud Audit Logs for all Google Cloud services in each project. Store the logs in regional Cloud Logging buckets with 30-day retention policies: This fails on multiple counts: it's not centralized (requires individual configuration), and the 30-day retention in Cloud Logging buckets is far short of the seven-year requirement. It also doesn't explicitly guarantee tamper-proof storage beyond the default logging immutability.

Therefore, option B directly addresses all aspects of the requirement: centralization via organization-level sinks, long-term storage with Cloud Storage, and immutability/tamper-proofing with object retention lock.

If the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is set, ADC uses the service account key or configuration file that the variable points to. If the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS isn't set, ADC uses the service account that is attached to the resource that is running your code. https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/production#passing_the_path_to_the_service_account_key_in_code

https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/ssl - SSL Proxy Load Balancing is a reverse proxy load balancer that distributes SSL traffic coming from the internet to virtual machine (VM) instances in your Google Cloud VPC network.