When an application needs to access Google Cloud APIs, it needs credentials. On Google Cloud, we can attach a service account to the underlying compute resource to let the application obtain credentials. On AWS and Azure, we can achieve something to the same effect by using workload identity federation. But what about on-premises?
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Workload identity federation supports OpenID Connect, so it should be compatible with AD FS. But until recently, workload identity federation didn’t work with AD FS-issued access tokens – only ID tokens worked properly. What was the issue there?
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Some Google Cloud APIs don’t support service accounts and require us to use domain-wide delegation. But using domain-wide delegation doesn’t mean we have to use service account keys.
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By default, IAP Desktop uses the rsa-ssh public key signature algorithm when authenticating to a Linux VM. That can be a problem in certain situations, which is why the latest version now adds support for ECDSA.
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By deploying a web application behind Identity-Aware-Proxy, we can ensure that an application only receives requests that are authenticated and satisfy the context-aware access rules we’ve configured. But there are still a few things that the web application needs to do itself.
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Workload identity federation lets us impersonate a Google Cloud service account by using credentials from an external identity provider. That’s a useful and powerful feature, but there are some things to watch out for.
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By using certificate-based authentication, we can let a Google Cloud service account authenticate to AD FS without having to manage any client secrets.
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A common way to let an application authenticate to KeyCloak is to use a client ID and secret. But when the application runs on Google Cloud, we can do better.
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In the last post we looked at how to set up a trust policy and role in AWS so that we can use a Google ID token to authenticate to AWS. But how do we actually use this in C#?
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By using workload identity federation, we can let applications use AWS credentials to authenticate to Google Cloud. That’s useful if we have an application that runs on AWS and needs access to Google APIs. But what if we are in the opposite situation, where we have an application on Google Cloud that needs access to AWS?
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Windows Server licensing is tricky, particularly if yur goal is to run Windows Server in the cloud and use existing licenses for it. But if you’re using Google Cloud’s sole-tenant nodes, a new best practices article can offer some help.
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By default, installing AD FS requires domain admin access to Active Directory. But it’s possible to deploy AD FS in environments where we don’t have these privileges, like Google Cloud’s Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory.
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When an application running on AWS needs access to Google APIs, we can use workload identity federation to let the application use its AWS credentials to authenticate to Google APIs. Unfortunately, the C# client library doesn’t support that yet, but we can fill that gap.
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By using workload identity federation, we can let applications use Azure credentials to authenticate to Google Cloud. That’s useful if we have an application that runs on Azure and needs access to Google APIs. But what if we are in the opposite situation, where we have an application on Google Cloud that needs access to Azure APIs?
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When an application running on Azure needs access to Google APIs, we can use workload identity federation to let the application use its Azure credentials to authenticate to Google APIs. Unfortunately, the C# client library doesn’t support that yet, but we can fill that gap.
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Last time, we looked at how we can use a Cloud KMS asymmetric signing key to create a self-signed X.509 certificate. But we’re not limited to self-signed certificates. We can use Cloud KMS to sign other certificate signing requests too, just like a certificate authority (CA).
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After you create an asymmetric signing key in Cloud KMS, you can download the key pair’s public key. The key is provided in PEM format – that’s pretty standard and all you need in many use cases. But especially when dealing with third party services, you sometimes need an X.509 certificate instead of a plain public key.
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Service accounts play a key role in Google Cloud IAM, and there are multiple ways how service accounts can authenticate. One of them is by using a service account key – but service account keys turn into a security risk if they aren’t managed carefully.
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Authenticating to Google Cloud when all we have are Kerberos or NTLM credentials
