Any open source project can be nominated for support. When selecting projects, the panel will put an emphasis on projects that either are vital to the health of the Internet or are end-user projects with a large user base. What do we expect in return?
We expect to see security improvements to open source software. Ideally, the project can provide us with a short blurb or pointers to some of the completed work that was possible because of our support. We don’t want to add bureaucracy, but would like to measure the success of the program. What about the existing Patch Rewards program?
This is an addition to the existing program, the current Patch Rewards program will continue as it stands today.
Binary Authorization for Borg is a deploy-time enforcement check
Binary Authorization for Borg, or BAB, is an internal deploy-time enforcement check that reduces insider risk by ensuring that production software and configuration deployed at Google is properly reviewed and authorized, especially when that code has the ability to access user data. BAB ensures that code and configuration deployments meet certain standards prior to being deployed. BAB includes both a deploy-time enforcement service to prevent unauthorized jobs from starting, and an audit trail of the code and configuration used in BAB-enabled jobs.
BAB ensures that Google's official software supply chain process is followed. First, a code change is reviewed and approved before being checked into Google's central source code repository. Next, the code is verifiably built and packaged using Google's central build system. This is done by creating the build in a secure sandbox and recording the package's origin in metadata for verification purposes. Finally, the job is deployed to Borg, with a job-specific identity. BAB rejects any package that lacks proper metadata, that did not follow the proper supply chain process, or that otherwise does not match the identity’s predefined policy.
Binary Authorization for Borg allows for several kinds of security checks
BAB can be used for many kinds of deploy-time security checks. Some examples include:
Is the binary built from checked in code?
Is the binary built verifiably?
Is the binary built from tested code?
Is the binary built from code intended to be used in the deployment?
After deployment, a job is continuously verified for its lifetime, to check that jobs that were started (and any that may still be running) conform to updates to their policies.
Binary Authorization for Borg provides other security benefits
Though the primary purpose of BAB is to limit the ability of a potentially malicious insider to run an unauthorized job that could access user data, BAB has other security benefits. BAB provides robust code identity for jobs in Google’s infrastructure, tying a job’s identity to specific code, and ensuring that only the specified code can be used to exercise the job identity’s privileges. This allows for a transition from a job identity—trusting an identity and any of its privileged human users transitively—to a code identity—trusting a specific piece of reviewed code to have specific semantics and which cannot be modified without an approval process.
BAB also dictates a common language for data protection, so that multiple teams can understand and meet the same requirements. Certain processes, such as those for financial reporting, need to meet certain change management requirements for compliance purposes. Using BAB, these checks can be automated, saving time and increasing the scope of coverage.
Binary Authorization for Borg is part of the BeyondProd model
BAB is one of several technologies used at Google to mitigate insider risk, and one piece of how we secure containers and microservices in production. By using containerized systems and verifying their BAB requirements prior to deployment, our systems are easier to debug, more reliable, and have a clearer change management process. More details on how Google has adopted a cloud-native security model are available in another whitepaper we are releasing today, “BeyondProd: A new approach to cloud-native security.”
In summary, implementing BAB, a deploy-time enforcement check, as part of Google’s containerized infrastructure and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) process has enabled us to verify that the code and configuration we deploy meet certain standards for security. Adopting BAB has allowed Google to reduce insider risk, prevent possible attacks, and also support the uniformity of our production systems. For more information about BAB, read our whitepaper, “Binary Authorization for Borg: how Google verifies code provenance and implements code identity.”
Additional contributors to this whitepaper include Kevin Chen, Software Engineer; Tim Dierks, Engineering Director; Maya Kaczorowski, Product Manager; Gary O’Connor, Technical Writing; Umesh Shankar, Principal Engineer; Adam Stubblefield, Distinguished Engineer; and Wilfried Teiken, Software Engineer; with special recognition to the entire Binary Authorization for Borg team for their ideation, engineering, and leadership
Whenever Google discovers a username and password exposed by another company’s data breach, we store a hashed and encrypted copy of the data on our servers with a secret key known only to Google.
When you sign in to a website, Chrome will send a hashed copy of your username and password to Google encrypted with a secret key only known to Chrome. No one, including Google, is able to derive your username or password from this encrypted copy.
In order to determine if your username and password appears in any breach, we use a technique called private set intersection with blinding that involves multiple layers of encryption. This allows us to compare your encrypted username and password with all of the encrypted breached usernames and passwords, without revealing your username and password, or revealing any information about any other users’ usernames and passwords. In order to make this computation more efficient, Chrome sends a 3-byte SHA256 hash prefix of your username to reduce the scale of the data joined from 4 billion records down to 250 records, while still ensuring your username remains anonymous.
Only you discover if your username and password have been compromised. If they have been compromised, Chrome will tell you, and we strongly encourage you to change your password.
Real-time phishing protection: Checking with Safe Browsing’s blocklist in real time.
Chrome’s new real-time phishing protection is also expanding existing technology — in this case it’s Google’s well-established Safe Browsing.
Every day, Safe Browsing discovers thousands of new unsafe sites and adds them to the blocklists shared with the web industry. Chrome checks the URL of each site you visit or file you download against this local list, which is updated approximately every 30 minutes. If you navigate to a URL that appears on the list, Chrome checks a partial URL fingerprint (the first 32 bits of a SHA-256 hash of the URL) with Google for verification that the URL is indeed dangerous. Google cannot determine the actual URL from this information.
However, we’re noticing that some phishing sites slip through our 30-minute refresh window, either by switching domains very quickly or by hiding from Google's crawlers.
That’s where real-time phishing protections come in. These new protections can inspect the URLs of pages visited with Safe Browsing’s servers in real time. When you visit a website, Chrome checks it against a list stored on your computer of thousands of popular websites that are known to be safe. If the website is not on the safe-list, Chrome checks the URL with Google (after dropping any username or password embedded in the URL) to find out if you're visiting a dangerous site. Our analysis has shown that this results in a 30% increase in protections by warning users on malicious sites that are brand new.
Expanding predictive phishing protection
Your password is the key to your online identity and data. If this key falls into the hands of attackers, they can easily impersonate you and get access to your data. We launched predictive phishing protections to warn users who are syncing history in Chrome when they enter their Google Account password into suspected phishing sites that try to steal their credentials.
With this latest release, we’re expanding this protection to everyone signed in to Chrome, even if you have not enabled Sync. In addition, this feature will now work for all the passwords you have stored in Chrome’s password manager.
If you type one of your protected passwords (this could be a password you stored in Chrome’s password manager, or the Google Account password you used to sign in to Chrome) into an unusual site, Chrome classifies this as a potentially dangerous event.
In such a scenario, Chrome checks the site against a list on your computer of thousands of popular websites that are known to be safe. If the website is not on the safe-list, Chrome checks the URL with Google (after dropping any username or password embedded in the URL). If this check determines that the site is indeed suspicious or malicious, Chrome will immediately show you a warning and encourage you to change your compromised password. If it was your Google Account password that was phished, Chrome also offers to notify Google so we can add additional protections to ensure your account isn't compromised.
By watching for password reuse, Chrome can give heightened security in critical moments while minimizing the data it shares with Google. We think predictive phishing protection will protect hundreds of millions more people.
We can’t tell if a call to open(/user/controlled, O_RDONLY) is a vulnerability without looking at the context. It depends on whether the contents are returned to the user or are used in some security sensitive way. A call to chmod(/user/controlled, mode) depending on the mode can be either a DoS or a privilege escalation. Accessing files in sticky directories (like /tmp) can become vulnerabilities if the attacker found an additional bug to delete arbitrary files.
How Pathauditor works
To find issues like this at scale we wrote PathAuditor, a tool that monitors file accesses and logs potential vulnerabilities. PathAuditor is a shared library that can be loaded into processes using LD_PRELOAD. It then hooks all filesystem related libc functions and checks if the access is safe. For that, we traverse the path and check if any component could be replaced by an unprivileged user, for example if a directory is user-writable. If we detect such a pattern, we log it to syslog for manual analysis.
Here's how you can use it to find vulnerabilities in your code:
LD_PRELOAD the library to your binary and then analyse its findings in syslog. You can also add the library to /etc/ld.so.preload, which will preload it in all binaries running on the system.
It will then gather the PID and the command line of the calling process, arguments of the vulnerable function, and a stack trace -- this provides a starting point for further investigation. At this point, you can use the stack trace to find the code path that triggered the violation and manually analyse what would happen if you would point the path to an arbitrary file or directory.
For example, if the code is opening a file and returning the content to the user then you could use it to read arbitrary files. If you control the path of chmod or chown, you might be able to change the permissions of chosen files and so on.
PathAuditor has proved successful at Google and we're excited to share it with the community. The project is still in the early stages and we are actively working on it. We look forward to hearing about any vulnerabilities you discover with the tool, and hope to see pull requests with further improvements.
The Android Security Rewards (ASR) program was created in 2015 to reward researchers who find and report security issues to help keep the Android ecosystem safe. Over the past 4 years, we have awarded over 1,800 reports, and paid out over four million dollars.
Today, we’re expanding the program and increasing reward amounts. We are introducing a top prize of $1 million for a full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices. Additionally, we will be launching a specific program offering a 50% bonus for exploits found on specific developer preview versions of Android, meaning our top prize is now $1.5 million.
As mentioned in a previous blog post, in 2019 Gartner rated the Pixel 3 with Titan M as having the most “strong” ratings in the built-in security section out of all devices evaluated. This is why we’ve created a dedicated prize to reward researchers for exploits found to circumvent the secure elements protections.
In addition to exploits involving Pixel Titan M, we have added other categories of exploits to the rewards program, such as those involving data exfiltration and lockscreen bypass. These rewards go up to $500,000 depending on the exploit category. For full details, please refer to the Android Security Rewards Program Rules page.
Now that we’ve covered some of what’s new, let’s take a look back at some milestones from this year. Here are some highlights from 2019:
Total payouts in the last 12 months have been over $1.5 million.
Over 100 participating researchers have received an average reward amount of over $3,800 per finding (46% increase from last year). On average, this means we paid out over $15,000 (20% increase from last year) per researcher!
The top reward paid out in 2019 was $161,337.
Top Payout
The highest reward paid out to a member of the research community was for a report from Guang Gong (@oldfresher) of Alpha Lab, Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd. This report detailed the first reported 1-click remote code execution exploit chain on the Pixel 3 device. Guang Gong was awarded $161,337 from the Android Security Rewards program and $40,000 by Chrome Rewards program for a total of $201,337. The $201,337 combined reward is also the highest reward for a single exploit chain across all Google VRP programs. The Chrome vulnerabilities leveraged in this report were fixed in Chrome 77.0.3865.75 and released in September, protecting users against this exploit chain.
We’d like to thank all of our researchers for contributing to the security of the Android ecosystem. If you’re interested in becoming a researcher, check out our Bughunter University for information on how to get started.
Starting today November 21, 2019 the new rewards take effect. Any reports that were submitted before November 21, 2019 will be rewarded based on the previously existing rewards table.
Before we dive deeper into this capability, let’s first cover the main use cases FIDO technology solves, and then explore how this new enhancement can satisfy an advanced requirement that can help enterprise organizations.
Main use cases FIDO technology aims to solve three separate use cases for relying parties (or otherwise referred to as Internet services) by helping to:
Prevent phishing during initial login to a service on a new device;
Reverify a user’s identity to a service on a device on which they’ve already logged in to;
Confirm that the device a user is connecting from is still the original device where they logged in from previously. This is typically needed in the enterprise.
Security-savvy professionals may interpret the third use case as a special instance of use case #2. However, there are some differences, which we break down a bit further below:
In case #2, the problem that FIDO technology tries to solve is re-verifying a user’s identity by unlocking a private key stored on the device.
In case #3, FIDO technology helps to determine whether a previously created key is still available on the original device without any proof of who the user is.
How use case #1 works: Roaming security keys
Because the whole premise of this use case is one in which the user logs in on a brand new device they’ve never authenticated before, this requires the user to have a FIDO security key (removeable, cross-platform, or a roaming authenticator). By this definition, a built-in FIDO authenticator on Chrome OS devices would not be able to satisfy this requirement, because it would not be able to help verify the user’s identity without being set up previously. Upon initial log-in, the user’s identity is verified together with the presence of a security key (such as Google’s Titan Security Key) previously tied to their account.
Titan Security Keys
Once the user is successfully logged in, trust is conferred from the security key to the device on which the user is logging on, usually by placing a cookie or other token on the device in order for the relying party to “remember” that the user already performed a second factor authenticator on this device. Once this step is completed, it is no longer necessary to require a physical second factor on this device because the presence of the cookie signals to the relying party that this device is to be trusted.
Optionally, some services might require the user to still periodically verify that it’s the correct user in front of the already recognized device (for example, particularly sensitive and regulated services such as financial services companies). In almost all cases, it shouldn’t be necessary for the user to also-in addition to providing their knowledge factor (such as a password) - re-present their second factor when re-authenticating as they’ve already done that during initial bootstrapping.
Note that on Chrome OS devices, your data is encrypted when you’re not logged on, which further protects your data against malicious access.
How use case #2 works: Re-authentication
Frequently referred to as “re-authentication,” use case #2 allows a relying party to reverify that the same user is still interacting with the service from a previously verified device. This mainly happens when a user performs an action that’s particularly sensitive, such as changing their password or when interacting with regulated services, such as financial services companies. In this case, a built-in biometric authenticator (e.g. a fingerprint sensor or PIN on Android devices) can be registered, which offers users a more convenient way to re-verify their identity to the service in question. In fact, we have recently enabled this use case on Android devices for some Google services.
Additionally, there are security benefits to this particular solution, as the relying party doesn’t only have to trust a previously issued cookie, but can now both verify that the right user is present (by means of a biometric) and that a particular private key is available on this particular device. Sometimes this promise is made based on key material stored in hardware (e.g. Titan security in Pixel Slate), which can be a strong indicator that the relying party is interacting with the right user on the right device.
How use case #3 works: Built-in device authenticator
The challenge of verifying that a device a user has previously logged in on is still the device from which they’re interacting with the relying party, is what the built-in FIDO authenticator on most latest-generation Chromebooks is able to help solve.
Earlier we noted that upon initial log-in, relying parties regularly place cookies or tokens on a user’s device, so they can remember that a user has previously authenticated. Under some circumstances, such as when there’s malware present on a device, it might be possible for these tokens to be exfiltrated. Asking for the “touch of a built-in authenticator” at regular intervals helps the relying party know that the user is still interacting from a legitimate device which has previously been issued a token. It also helps verify that the token has not been exfiltrated to a different device since FIDO authenticators offer increased protection against the exfiltration of the private key. This is because it’s usually housed in the hardware itself. For example, in the case of most latest-generation Chromebooks (e.g. Pixel Slate), it’s protected by hardware-based Titan security.
Pixel Slate devices are built with hardware-based Titan security
In the case of our implementation on Chrome OS, the FIDO keys are also scoped to the specific logged in user, meaning that every user on the device essentially gets their own FIDO authenticator that can’t be accessed across user boundaries. We expect this use case to be particularly useful in enterprise environments, which is why the feature is not enabled by default. Administrators can enable it in the Google Admin console.
We still highly recommend users to have a primary FIDO security key, such as Titan Security Key or an Android phone. This should be used in conjunction with a “FIDO re-authentication” policy, which is supported by G Suite.
Enabling the built-in FIDO authenticator in the Google Admin console
Even though it’s technically possible to register the built-in FIDO authenticator on a Chrome OS device as a “security key” with services, it’s best to avoid this instance as users can run an increased risk of account lockout if they ever need to sign in to the service from a different machine.
Supported Chromebooks
Starting with Chrome 76, most latest-generation Chromebooks gained the option to enable a built-in FIDO authenticator backed by hardware-based Titan security. To see if your Chromebook can be enabled with this capability, you can navigate to chrome://system and check the “tpm-version” entry. If “vendor” equals “43524f53”, then your Chromebook is backed by Titan security.
Navigating to chrome://system on your Chromebook
Summary
In summary, we believe that this new enhancement can provide value to enterprise organizations that want to confirm that the device a user is connecting from is still the original device from which a user logged in from in the past. Most users, however, should be using roaming FIDO security keys, such as Titan Security Key, their Android phone, or security keys from other vendors, in order to avoid account lockouts.
Posted by Dave Kleidermacher, VP, Android Security & Privacy
Fighting against bad actors in the ecosystem is a top priority for Google, but we know there are others doing great work to find and protect against attacks. Our research partners in the mobile security world have built successful teams and technology, helping us in the fight. Today, we’re excited to take this collaboration to the next level, announcing a partnership between Google, ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium. It’s called the App Defense Alliance and together, we’re working to stop bad apps before they reach users’ devices.
The Android ecosystem is thriving with over 2.5 billion devices, but this popularity also makes it an attractive target for abuse. This is true of all global platforms: where there is software with worldwide proliferation, there are bad actors trying to attack it for their gain. Working closely with our industry partners gives us an opportunity to collaborate with some truly talented researchers in our field and the detection engines they’ve built. This is all with the goal of, together, reducing the risk of app-based malware, identifying new threats, and protecting our users.
What will the App Defense Alliance do?
Our number one goal as partners is to ensure the safety of the Google Play Store, quickly finding potentially harmful applications and stopping them from being published
As part of this Alliance, we are integrating our Google Play Protect detection systems with each partner’s scanning engines. This will generate new app risk intelligence as apps are being queued to publish. Partners will analyze that dataset and act as another, vital set of eyes prior to an app going live on the Play Store.
Who are the partners?
All of our partners work in the world of endpoint protection, and offer specific products to protect mobile devices and the mobile ecosystem. Like Google Play Protect, our partners’ technologies use a combination of machine learning and static/dynamic analysis to detect abusive behavior. Multiple heuristic engines working in concert will increase our efficiency in identifying potentially harmful apps.
We hand-picked these partners based on their successes in finding potential threats and their dedication to improving the ecosystem. These partners are regularly recognized in analyst reports for their work.
Industry collaboration is key
Knowledge sharing and industry collaboration are important aspects in securing the world from attacks. We believe working together is the ultimate way we will get ahead of bad actors. We’re excited to work with these partners to arm the Google Play Store against bad apps.
Want to learn more about the App Defense Alliance’s work? Visit us here.
Today, along with our partners, we are excited to announce OpenTitan - the first open source silicon root of trust (RoT) project. OpenTitan will deliver a high-quality RoT design and integration guidelines for use in data center servers, storage, peripherals, and more. Open sourcing the silicon design makes it more transparent, trustworthy, and ultimately, secure.
The OpenTitan logo
Anchoring trust in silicon
Silicon RoT can help ensure that the hardware infrastructure and the software that runs on it remain in their intended, trustworthy state by verifying that the critical system components boot securely using authorized and verifiable code. Silicon RoT can provide many security benefits by helping to:
Ensure that a server or a device boots with the correct firmware and hasn't been infected by a low-level malware.
Provide a cryptographically unique machine identity, so an operator can verify that a server or a device is legitimate.
Protect secrets like encryption keys in a tamper-resistant way even for people with physical access (e.g., while a server or a device is being shipped).
Provide authoritative, tamper-evident audit records and other runtime security services.
The silicon RoT technology can be used in server motherboards, network cards, client devices (e.g., laptops, phones), consumer routers, IoT devices, and more. For example, Google has relied on a custom-made RoT chip, Titan, to help ensure that machines in Google’s data centers boot from a known trustworthy state with verified code; it is our system root of trust. Recognizing the importance of anchoring the trust in silicon, together with our partners we want to spread the benefits of reliable silicon RoT chips to our customers and the rest of the industry. We believe that the best way to accomplish that is through open source silicon.
Raising the transparency and security bar
Similar to open source software, open source silicon can:
Enhance trust and security through design and implementation transparency. Issues can be discovered early, and the need for blind trust is reduced.
Enable and encourage innovation through contributions to the open source design.
Provide implementation choice and preserve a set of common interfaces and software compatibility guarantees through a common, open reference design.
OpenTitan is an active engineering project staffed by a team of engineers representing a coalition of partners who bring ideas and expertise from many perspectives. We are transparently building the logical design of a silicon RoT, including an open source microprocessor (the lowRISC Ibex, a RISC-V-based design), cryptographic coprocessors, a hardware random number generator, a sophisticated key hierarchy, memory hierarchies for volatile and non-volatile storage, defensive mechanisms, IO peripherals, secure boot, and more. With OpenTitan, a coalition of partners have come together to deliver a more open, transparent, and high-quality RoT.
A comparison of the major design components of a traditional RoT and an OpenTitan RoT
The OpenTitan project is rooted in three key principles:
Transparency - anyone can inspect, evaluate, and contribute to OpenTitan’s design and documentation to help build more transparent, trustworthy silicon RoT for all.
High quality - we are building a high-quality logically-secure silicon design, including reference firmware, verification collateral, and technical documentation.
Flexibility - adopters can reduce costs and reach more customers by using a vendor- and platform-agnostic silicon RoT design that can be integrated into data center servers, storage, peripheral and other devices.
Participating in the OpenTitan project
OpenTitan will be helpful for chip manufacturers, platform providers, and security-conscious enterprise organizations that want to enhance their infrastructure with silicon-based security. Visit our GitHub repository today.
If you are interested in actively collaborating on OpenTitan to help make secure open source silicon a reality, we encourage you to contact the OpenTitan team. If you would like your product to be considered for a pilot OpenTitan RoT integration, the team would be excited to hear from you.
How do you identify and categorize all the services that should be gated?
Google began as a web-based company, and as it matured in the modern era, most internal business applications were developed with a web-first approach. These applications were hosted on similar internal architecture as our external services, with the exception that they could only be accessed on corporate office networks. Thus, identifying services to be gated by BeyondCorp was made easier for us due to the fact that most internal services were already properly inventoried and hosted via standard, central solutions. Migration, in many cases, was as simple as a DNS change. Solid IT asset inventory systems and maintenance are critical to migrating to a zero trust security model.
Enforcement of zero trust access policies began with services which we determined would not be meaningfully impacted by the change in access requirements. For most services, requirements could be gathered via typical access log analysis or consulting with service owners. Services which could not be readily gated by default ACL requirements required service owners to develop strict access groups and/or eliminate risky workflows before they could be migrated.
How do you know which trust tier is needed for every service?
As discussed in our previous blog post, Google makes internal services available based on device trust tiers. Today, those services are accessible by the highest trust tier by default.
When the intent of the change is to restrict access to a service to a specific group or team, service owners are free to propose access changes to add or remove restrictions to their service. Access changes which are deemed to be sufficiently low risk can be automatically approved. In all other cases, such as where the owning team wants to expose a service to a risky device tier, they must work with security engineers to follow the principle of least privilege and devise solutions.
What do you do with services that are incompatible with BeyondCorp ideals?
It may not always be possible to gate an application by the preferred zero trust solution. Services that cannot be easily gated typically fall into these categories:
Type 1: "Non-proxyable protocols", e.g. non-HTTP/HTTPS traffic.
Type 2: Low latency requirements or localized high throughput traffic.
Type 3: Administrative and emergency access networks.
The typical first step in finding a solution for these cases is finding a way to remove the need for that service altogether. In many cases, this was made possible by deprecating or replacing systems which could not be made compatible with the BeyondCorp implementation.
When that was not an option, we found that no single solution would work for all critical requirements:
Solutions for the "Type 1" traffic have generally involved maintaining a specialized client tunneling which strongly enforces authentication and authorization decisions on the client and the server end of the connection. This is usually client/server type traffic which is similar to HTTP traffic in that connectivity is typically multi-point to point.
Solutions to the "Type 2" problems generally rely on moving BeyondCorp-compatible compute resources locally or developing a solution tightly integrated with network access equipment to selectively forward "local" traffic without permanently opening network holes.
As for “Type 3,” it would be ideal to completely eliminate all privileged internal networks. However, the reality is that some privileged networking will likely always be required to maintain the network itself and also to provide emergency access during outages.
It should be noted that server-to-server traffic in secure production data center environments does not necessarily rely on BeyondCorp, although many systems are integrated regardless, due to the Service-Oriented Design benefits that BeyondCorp inherently provides.
How do you prioritize gating?
Prioritization starts by identifying all the services that are currently accessible via internal IP-access alone and migrating the most critical services to BeyondCorp, while working to slowly ratchet down permissions via exception management processes. Criticality of the service may also depend on the number and type of users, sensitivity of data handled, security and privacy risks enabled by the service.
Migration logistics
Most services required integration testing with the BeyondCorp proxy. Service teams were encouraged to stand up "test" services which were used to test functionality behind the BeyondCorp proxy. Most services that performed their own access control enforcement were reconfigured to instead rely on BeyondCorp for all user/group authentication and authorization. Service teams have been encouraged to develop their own "fine-grained" discretionary access controls in the services by leveraging session data provided by the BeyondCorp proxy.
Lessons learnt
Allow coarse gating and exceptions
Inventory: It's easy to overlook the importance of keeping a good inventory of services, devices, owners and security exceptions. The journey to a BeyondCorp world should start by solving organizational challenges when managing and maintaining data quality in inventory systems. In short, knowing how a service works, who should access it, and what makes that acceptable are the central tenets of managing BeyondCorp. Fine-grained access control is severely complicated when this insight is missing.
Legacy protocols: Most large enterprises will inevitably need to support workflows and protocols which cannot be migrated to a BeyondCorp world (in any reasonable amount of time). Exception management and service inventory become crucial at this stage while stakeholders develop solutions.
Run highly reliable systems
The BeyondCorp initiative would not be sustainable at Google’s scale without the involvement of various Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams across the inventory systems, BeyondCorp infrastructure and client side solutions. The ability to successfully achieve wide-spread adoption of changes this large can be hampered by perceived (or in some cases, actual) reliability issues. Understanding the user workflows that might be impacted, working with key stakeholders and ensuring the transition is smooth and trouble-free for all users helps protect against backlash and avoids users finding undesirable workarounds. By applying our reliability engineering practices, those teams helped to ensure that the components of our implementation all have availability and latency targets, operational robustness, etc. These are compatible with our business needs and intended user experiences.
Put employees in control as much as possible
Employees cover a broad range of job functions with varying requirements of technology and tools. In addition to communicating changes to our employees early, we provide them with self-service solutions for handling exceptions or addressing issues affecting their devices. By putting our employees in control, we help to ensure that security mechanisms do not get in their way, helping with the acceptance and scaling processes.
Summary
Throughout this series of blog posts, we set out to revisit and demystify BeyondCorp, Google’s internal implementation of a zero trust security model. The four posts had different focus areas - setting context, devices, tiered access and, finally, services (this post).
If you want to learn more, you can check out the BeyondCorp research papers. In addition, getting started with BeyondCorp is now easier using zero trust solutions from Google Cloud (context-aware access) and other enterprise providers. Lastly, stay tuned for an upcoming BeyondCorp webinar on Cloud OnAir in a few months where you will be able to learn more and ask us questions. We hope that these blog posts, research papers, and webinars will help you on your journey to enable zero trust access.
Thank you to the editors of the BeyondCorp blog post series, Puneet Goel (Product Manager), Lior Tishbi (Program Manager), and Justin McWilliams (Engineering Manager).
We partnered with Yubico to manufacture the USB-C Titan Security Key. We have had a long-standing working and customer relationship with Yubico that began in 2012 with the collaborative effort to create the FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, the first open standard to enable phishing-resistant authentication. This is the same security technology that we use at Google to protect access to internal applications and systems.
USB-C Titan Security Keys are built with a hardware secure element chip that includes firmware engineered by Google to verify the key’s integrity. This is the same secure element chip and firmware that we use in our existing USB-A/NFC and Bluetooth/NFC/USB Titan Security Key models manufactured in partnership with Feitian Technologies.
USB-C Titan Security Keys will be available tomorrow individually for $40 on the Google Store in the United States. USB-A/NFC and Bluetooth/NFC/USB Titan Security Keys will also become available individually in addition to the existing bundle. Bulk orders are available for enterprise organizations in select countries.
We highly recommend all users at a higher risk of targeted attacks to get Titan Security Keys and enroll into the Advanced Protection Program (APP), which provides Google’s industry-leading security protections to defend against evolving methods that attackers use to gain access to your accounts and data. You can also use Titan Security Keys for any site where FIDO security keys are supported for 2FA, including your personal or work Google Account, 1Password, Coinbase, Dropbox, Facebook, GitHub, Salesforce, Stripe, Twitter, and more.
Accessing Site settings, from which users will be able to unblock mixed content loads in Chrome 79.
In Chrome 80, mixed audio and video resources will be autoupgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 80 will be released to early release channels in January 2020. Users can unblock affected audio and video resources with the setting described above.
Also in Chrome 80, mixed images will still be allowed to load, but they will cause Chrome to show a “Not Secure” chip in the omnibox. We anticipate that this is a clearer security UI for users and that it will motivate websites to migrate their images to HTTPS. Developers can use the upgrade-insecure-requests or block-all-mixed-content Content Security Policy directives to avoid this warning.
Omnibox treatment for websites that load mixed images in Chrome 80.
In Chrome 81, mixed images will be autoupgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 81 will be released to early release channels in February 2020.
Resources for developers
Developers should migrate their mixed content to https:// immediately to avoid warnings and breakage. Here are some resources:
See this guide for general advice on migrating servers to HTTPS.
Check with your CDN, web host, or content management system to see if they have special tools for debugging mixed content. For example, Cloudflare offers a tool to rewrite mixed content to https://, and WordPress plugins are available as well.
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