Security and Identity Flashcards
What is Secret Manager?
Secret Manager is a service that stores and manages confidential data like API keys & certificates.
What is Cloud KMS?
Cloud KMS (Key management service) is a service that manages cryptographic keys (asymmetric & symmetric) and controls their use in application and GCP Services.
It integrates with most GCP services that use data encryption.
What is asymmetric Key Encryption?
Using two different keys to encrypt data.
A private key (kept safe by the application/owner) is used to decrypt the data.
A public key (given anyone who needs it) is used to encrypt the data.
What is symmetric Key Encryption?
Using one key to encrypt and decrypt data.
What are the four kinds of key management in Cloud KMS?
Google-managed: Created and managed by Google. No config required.
Customer-Managed: Created and managed by you.
Customer-Provided: Import an existing key to manage in Cloud KMS.
Externally-managed key: A key that is stored in an external key manager.
What is a keyring?
A keyring is a store for Cloud KMS keys within a Google Cloud location. They’re used to group and organise keys and control access to groups of keys.
You can’t make a key without a keyring.
What are the two protection levels for keys?
Software & Hardware.
What is the difference between the two protection levels for keys?
Hardware level keys use hardware security modules for encryption.
Software level keys are generated with software.
What are the three purposes you can assign to a key in Cloud KMS?
Symmetric encryption/decryption (only for symmetric keys).
Asymmetric signing (only for asymmetric keys).
Asymmetric decryption (only for asymmetric keys).
What are the steps to use Secret Manager?
- Enable the API (once for project)
- Assign the Secret Manager Admin role on the project, folder, or Organization
- Authenticate to the Secret Mnaager.
How can you authenticate to the Secret Manager?
If using client libraries, by setting up Application Default Credentials
If using Google Cloud CLI, using Google Cloud CLI credentials
If using a REST call, either of the above two.
How do you rotate secrets in Secret Manager?
There’s no automatic way of rotating keys in Secret Manager.
You must run a GCloud CLI command to define the rotation schedule and which Pub/Sub topic/s will receive the SECRET_ROTATE message. Then every subscriber to the topic must handle the message themselves.
How do you rotate keys in Cloud KMS?
To automatically rotate a key, you can specify a key rotation period and start date during and after key creation.
To manually rotate a key, you navigate to the key to rotate and click on the rotate button.
Can you automatically expire secrets?
Yes, but doing so is instant and without warning which may lead to important data being deleted without a backup.
Can you automatically rotate asymmetric keys in Cloud KMS?
No. Google Cloud doesn’t support it.