Configure hierarchical security policies

This page contains information about configuring hierarchical security policies to protect you organization, folders, or projects. Before you configure hierarchical security policies, make sure that you're familiar with the information in the hierarchical security policies overview.

Set up IAM permissions for hierarchical security policies

The following operations require that you have the Identity and Access Management (IAM) role Compute Organization Security Policy Admin role (roles/compute.orgSecurityPolicyAdmin) on the target resource hierarchy node, or on the policy itself if it already exists:

  • Create a new hierarchical security policy
  • Modify a hierarchical security policy by adding, updating, or deleting rules
  • Delete a hierarchical security policy

The following operations require that you have the IAM Compute Organization Resource Admin role (roles/compute.orgSecurityResourceAdmin) on the target resource hierarchy node, in addition to either the Compute Organization Security Policy Admin role (roles/compute.orgSecurityPolicyAdmin) or the Compute Organization Security Policy User role (roles/compute.orgSecurityPolicyUser) on either the target resource hierarchy node or on the policy itself:

  • Associate a hierarchical security policy with a resource hierarchy node

Finally, see the following table for a list of miscellaneous operations that you can perform if you have any of the listed roles:

Operations Roles
View all effective Google Cloud Armor rules for a backend resource
View effective backend resources covered by an organizationSecurityPolicy

Configure hierarchical security policies

The following sections explain how to create hierarchical security policies, associate them with resource hierarchy nodes, move them between nodes, delete them, and how to view all of the Google Cloud Armor security policy rules that apply to a protected resource.

Create a hierarchical security policy

You create a hierarchical security policy by using the gcloud beta compute org-security-policies create command. You create the hierarchical security policy under an organization or a folder using the --organization or --folder flag, along with the corresponding ORGANIZATION_ID or FOLDER_ID. Use the following examples to create hierarchical security policies, replacing POLICY_NAME with the name that you want to give the new security policy:

  • Create an organization-level hierarchical security policy:

    gcloud beta compute org-security-policies create \
    --organization=ORGANIZATION_ID \
    --type=CLOUD_ARMOR \
    --short-name=POLICY_NAME

  • Create a folder-level hierarchical security policy:

    gcloud beta compute org-security-policies create \ 
    --folder=FOLDER_ID \
    --type=CLOUD_ARMOR \
    --short-name=POLICY_NAME

Associate an existing security policy with a resource hierarchy node

If you have an existing security policy, you can associate it with a resource hierarchy node by using the gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create command. Replace the following:

  • POLICY_ID: the ID of the security policy
  • POLICY_NAME: the name of the security policy
  • ORGANIZATION_ID: the ID of the organization
  • FOLDER_ID: the ID of the folder

  • PROJECT_ID: the ID of the project

  • Associate a hierarchical security policy to an organization:

    gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create \
    --security-policy=POLICY_ID \
    --organization=ORGANIZATION_ID \
    --name=ASSOCIATION_NAME

  • Associate a hierarchical security policy to a folder:

    gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create \
    --security-policy=POLICY_ID \
    --folder=FOLDER_ID \
    --name=ASSOCIATION_NAME

  • Associate a hierarchical security policy to a project:

    gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create \
  --security-policy=POLICY_ID \
  --project-number=PROJECT_ID \
  --name=ASSOCIATION_NAME

Exclude projects from hierarchical security policies

In addition, you can exclude projects from your folder-level hierarchical security policies, and you can exclude both projects and folders from your organization-level hierarchical security policies:

  • You can exclude projects from a hierarchical security policy by using the beta compute org-security-policies associations create command with the --excluded-projects flag.

    The following example command associates security policy example-policy with organization 10000001, while excluding the project with the ID 2000000002:

    gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create \
    --security-policy=example-policy \
    --excluded-projects="projects/2000000002" \
    --organization=10000001

  • You can exclude folders from an organization-level hierarchical security policy by using the beta compute org-security-policies associations create command with the --excluded-folders flag.

    The following example command associates security policy example-policy with organization 10000001, while excluding the folder with the ID 3000000003:

    gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create \
    --security-policy=example-policy \
    --excluded-folders="folders/3000000003" \
    --organization=10000001

Move a hierarchical security policy

You can change the parent of a hierarchical security policy by using the gcloud beta compute org-security-policies move to move the hierarchical security policy under a different parent resource hierarchy node. You supply the source as the first flag, and the destination as the second flag. Moving a hierarchical security policy changes its ownership, not the resources with which it is associated. Only organizations and folders can own hierarchical security policies, so you can't move them under projects.

In the following example, you move a hierarchical security policy from the organization ORGANIZATION_ID to the folder FOLDER_ID:

gcloud beta compute org-security-policies move policy-1 \
    --organization ORGANIZATION_ID \
    --folder FOLDER_ID

Delete a hierarchical security policy

Before you can delete a hierarchical security policy, you must first delete all associations that the policy has to resource hierarchy nodes. In the following example, you use the beta compute org-security-policies associations delete command to remove the association named ASSOCIATION_NAME between the hierarchical security policy with the name POLICY_NAME and the organization ORGANIZATION_ID:

gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations delete ASSOCIATION_NAME \
    --security-policy=POLICY_NAME \
    --organization=ORGANIZATION_ID

If this isn't the only association that the security policy has, repeat the previous step for each association. When the hierarchical security policy has no associations, you can delete it by using the compute org-security-policies delete command, like in the following example:

gcloud beta compute org-security-policies delete POLICY_NAME \
    --organization=ORGANIZATION_ID

View all effective Google Cloud Armor rules for a protected resource

You can view all of the Google Cloud Armor security policy rules that apply to a protected resource by using the gcloud beta compute backend-services get-effective-security-policies command. In the following example, replace RESOURCE_NAME with the name of the protected resource that you want to check:

gcloud beta compute backend-services get-effective-security-policies PROTECTED_RESOURCE

When you run the gcloud beta compute get-effective-security-policies command on a backend service within a project that inherits a hierarchical security policy, the response might include the hierarchical security policy even if that specific backend service's type isn't supported by hierarchical security policies. For a list of supported backend configurations for hierarchical security policies, see the hierarchical security policies overview.

Use cases

The following sections describe use cases for hierarchical security policies.

Deny traffic from a set of IP addresses to all Application Load Balancers in your organization

You can use hierarchical security policies to manage a list of IP addresses that aren't allowed to access your entire organization network, or to deny traffic from a specific region or country. This can help you address company-specific security concerns or help you maintain compliance. The following steps show you how to create an organization-level hierarchical security policy that denies traffic from IP address range 192.0.2.0/24:

  1. Create a hierarchical security policy called org-level-deny-ip-policy, attached to an organization with ID 1000000001:

     gcloud beta compute org-security-policies create \
     --organization=1000000001 \
     --type=CLOUD_ARMOR \
     --description= "this is an org policy to deny a set of IP addresses for all resources" \
     --short-name=org-level-deny-ip-policy

  2. Add a rule at priority 1000 with a match condition for the IP address range 192.0.2.0/24 and a deny action:

     gcloud beta compute org-security-policies rules create 1000 \
     --action=deny \
     --security-policy=org-level-deny-ip-policy \
     --organization=1000000001 \
     --description "Deny traffic from 192.0.2.0/24" \
     --src-ip-ranges "192.0.2.0/24"

  3. Finally, associate the security policy with the organization, denying requests from the 192.0.2.0/24 IP address to all services in the organization:

     gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create \
     --security-policy=org-level-deny-ip-policy \
     --organization=ORGANIZATION_ID

Grant a set of source IP addresses access to some projects within your organization

You can grant access to some projects within your organization to an IP address or to several IP addresses. You might want to do this if you have a trusted upstream proxy that you want to exclude from rule evaluation for only some of your projects. In the following Cloud CDN-based example, you use a folder-level hierarchical security policy to grant the IP address range 192.0.2.0/24 access to projects named project-1, project-2, and project-3 in organization 10000001:

  1. Use the following commands to move project-1, project-2, and project-3 into a folder with ID 20000002:

    gcloud projects move project-1 --folder=20000002
gcloud projects move project-2 --folder=20000002
gcloud projects move project-3 --folder=20000002

  2. Use the following command to create a security policy named org-level-proxy-filtering:

     gcloud beta compute org-security-policies create \
     --folder=20000002 \
     --type=CLOUD_ARMOR \
     --short-name=org-level-proxy-filtering

  3. Add a rule at priority 1000 with a match condition for the IP address range 192.0.2.0/24 and a goto_next rule action. If a request matches this condition, Google Cloud Armor stops evaluating rules within this security policy:

     gcloud beta compute org-security-policies rules create 1000 \
     --action=goto_next \
     --security-policy=org-level-proxy-filtering \
     --organization=10000001 \
     --src-ip-ranges="192.0.2.0/24"

  4. Optional: If you want to apply security policy rules to these projects for requests that aren't from 192.0.2.0/24 , add more rules at a priority lower than 1000. You can perform this step later.

  5. Use the following command to associate the policy to the folder with ID 20000002, which you moved the projects to in step 1:

     gcloud beta compute org-security-policies associations create \
     --security-policy=org-level-proxy-filtering \
     --folder=20000002

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