GCP Shared Service Account Pain Point
Circumvention of Security Protocols: One of the pain points in GCP is the standing access for GCP Service Account. This could be very challenging and it could necessitate the need for a tool to control standing access in GCP. Because if you think about it, that the individual account have more granular controls, auditing and MFA that are lost when a developer uses a GCP shared service account.
Principle of Least Privilege: A single service account often has broad permissions, creating a security risk if compromised.
Access Management Challenges: Managing and revoking access for numerous service accounts across different projects and developers is administratively complex and prone to error.
Main Pain Point
- Developers use shared service accounts and those accounts have a excessive permissions and more importantly standing permissions.
- Developer use those service accounts using CLI. Developers use the JASON file that is long standing. Or they. grant the impersonation rights. JASON is more common.
- When a GCP developers uses a JSON file, they are directly using a service account key. This key is a static, long-lived credential.
- GCP Service account impersonation is a more secure method where a user’s personal identity is used to temporarily “act as” a service account. This avoids the security risks of static key files.
GCP How Impersonation Works
- Principal and Target: Impersonation involves two identities: the authenticated principal (a developer’s user account) and the target service account.
- Permission Check: The developer’s user account must have the roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreatorpermission on the target service account. This permission allows them to create short-lived credentials for that service account.
- Requesting Credentials: The developer’s tool (like the gcloud CLI) uses their personal credentials to request a temporary access token from GCP for the target service account.
- Using the Token: The tool then uses this short-lived token to access GCP services, inheriting the permissions of the service account. The developer never touches a static key file.
Impersonation vs. JSON Key Files
| Feature | Service Account Impersonation | JSON Key Files |
| Credential Type | Short-lived, temporary tokens. | Long-lived, static key files. |
| Security | More secure. If a token is stolen, it expires quickly. | Less secure. A stolen key file can be used indefinitely until it is revoked. |
| Authentication | The developer’s user account is the authenticated principal. | The JSON key file is the sole form of authentication. |
| Audit Trail | Actions are logged with the developer’s user account as the initial actor, along with the service account. | Actions are only logged with the service account’s identity. |
| Best Practice | Recommended for most use cases, especially for developers and CI/CD systems. | Discouraged. Only use when there is no alternative, such as with legacy systems outside of GCP. |
Impersonation method is the modern, more secure way to provide developers with the necessary access to services like Pub/Sub or Cloud Storage without exposing long-lived, high-risk credentials.
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