Professional-Cloud-Security-Engineer Premium Exam Questions

To enhance the security of your microservices architecture on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and ensure that only approved container images are deployed, implementing Binary Authorization is a robust solution.​

Option A: Enforcing Binary Authorization in your GKE clusters ensures that only container images that meet your organization's security policies are deployed. By integrating container image vulnerability scanning into your Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, you can assess images for known vulnerabilities before they are deployed. Binary Authorization can be configured to use these vulnerability scan results to make policy decisions, effectively preventing the deployment of insecure images. This approach leverages managed services provided by Google Cloud, ensuring scalability and compliance with security standards.​

Option B: Developing custom organization policies to restrict deployments to images within a specific Artifact Registry project helps in controlling the source of images but does not inherently assess the security posture of those images. Without integrated vulnerability scanning and enforcement mechanisms, this approach may not fully mitigate the risk of deploying vulnerable images.​

Option C: Building a system using third-party vulnerability databases and custom scripts requires significant maintenance and may not integrate seamlessly with GKE. This approach can be error-prone and lacks the efficiency of managed services designed for this purpose.​

Option D: Automatically deploying new images upon successful CI/CD builds ensures rapid deployment but does not address the need for security assessments of the images. While setting up firewall rules is good practice, it does not prevent the deployment of potentially vulnerable images.​

Therefore, Option A is the most effective approach, as it utilizes Google Cloud's managed services to enforce security policies and integrate vulnerability assessments directly into the deployment process, ensuring that only approved and secure container images are deployed to your GKE clusters.​

Scenarios for exporting Cloud Logging data: Splunk This scenario shows how to export selected logs from Cloud Logging to Pub/Sub for ingestion into Splunk. Splunk is a security information and event management (SIEM) solution that supports several ways of ingesting data, such as receiving streaming data out of Google Cloud through Splunk HTTP Event Collector (HEC) or by fetching data from Google Cloud APIs through Splunk Add-on for Google Cloud. Using the Pub/Sub to Splunk Dataflow template, you can natively forward logs and events from a Pub/Sub topic into Splunk HEC. If Splunk HEC is not available in your Splunk deployment, you can use the Add-on to collect the logs and events from the Pub/Sub topic.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The key requirement is restricting access based on the client device (i.e., "corporate computers"). Context-Aware Access (CAA) is the specific Google Cloud tool designed to enforce access based on contextual factors, including the device security status or IP address.

Context Restriction: Context-Aware Access allows you to define an Access Level based on attributes like device policy compliance, operating system, or IP address range—this addresses the "corporate computers" requirement.

Isolation and Control: The Access Level is then enforced via an Organization Policy applied at the Project Level (or the folder/organization level), which fulfills the requirement to isolate access to Cloud Storage for this project and restrict the access to specific resources (Cloud Storage).

VPC Service Controls (VPC SC) (Option B) are great for isolating projects and preventing data exfiltration, but its primary access restriction mechanisms are based on IP range, not fine-grained device security posture and user identity together, making CAA the more precise tool for device-specific enforcement. Also, applying VPC SC ingress/egress based on IP addresses for end-user access can be complex and less flexible than CAA.

IAM (Option D) only controls who (identity) can access a resource, not where or how (context) they are accessing it from.

Extracts:

"Context-Aware Access (CAA) integrates with Google Workspace or Cloud Identity to enforce granular access to Google Cloud resources based on a user's context, such as their location, device security status, and IP address." (Source 7.1)

"To enforce CAA for Google Cloud resources like Cloud Storage, you create an Access Level that defines the required context (e.g., only corporate-managed devices) and apply it via an Organization Policy constraint (e.g., iam.allowedServices) at the project level." (Source 7.2)

"CAA allows you to restrict access based on the device security posture, a key requirement for enforcing 'corporate computer' access." (Source 7.3)

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The greatest risk to regulatory compliance stems from violations of the Principle of Least Privilege and the lack of enforced configuration/hardening standards. Regulatory compliance typically mandates strict control over infrastructure and sensitive systems.

Option A (Greatest Risk): Broad IAM roles violate the principle of least privilege, which is a fundamental compliance requirement (e.g., ISO 27001, PCI DSS). Allowing users to create and manage critical resources (VMs) without a pre-defined hardening process means new resources can be deployed in a non-compliant, vulnerable state (e.g., unpatched, open ports, default configurations). This lack of control and excessive access poses an immediate and high risk to the security posture and compliance.

Option B (Risk Reduction): Uniform bucket-level access reduces risk by enforcing a consistent policy for all objects in a bucket, preventing individual object-level IAM policies that can lead to misconfigurations and unauthorized access.

Option C (Risk Reduction): Mandating CMEK is a security-enhancing control that reduces risk by giving the customer exclusive control over the encryption keys for sensitive data, which is a common requirement in regulated environments.

Option D (Necessary Control): Providing the audit team access to Cloud Audit Logs is a compliance requirement for monitoring, accountability, and forensic investigation, not a risk.

Extracts:

"The principle of least privilege states that a user should only be granted the minimum permissions necessary to perform their work. Overly permissive roles introduce a significant risk." (Source 5.1)

"Non-compliant configurations, such as unhardened virtual machines or resources with insufficient security controls, are a major source of security breaches and regulatory findings." (Source 5.2)