When users sign in to an application that uses Google OAuth or OpenID Connect, they typically see a consent screen. But there’s more than one type of consent screen, and the type of consent screen that users end up seeing not only depends on the publisher, but also on the administrative controls applied on the consumer side
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Using workload identity federation, we can let Azure-hosted applications authenticate to Google Cloud using their managed identity. That also works for Azure App Services, but it requires a little extra work.
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Using workload identity federation, we can let an AWS-hosted application authenticate to Google Cloud using its AWS credentials. That also works for Lambda functions.
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By combining workload identity federation with a token broker, we can enable workloads and devices to authenticate to Google Cloud using all sorts of credentials, including X.509 client certificates.
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Workload identity federation isn’t limited to authenticating workloads between cloud providers. There are many other scenarios where it can be useful to use workload identity federation instead of service account keys. Not all platforms or services support workload identity federation, but it’s not too difficult to change that.
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Whenever we want to call a Google or Google Cloud API, we need an access token. But there’s more than one way to obtain an access token, and depending on which way we use, the resulting access token might behave a little differently. What kinds of access tokens are there, and how do they differ?
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When developing applications that use the Google Cloud API, being able to trace and inspect HTTP requests with a tool like Fiddler can be a great debugging aid. But getting Fiddler to work with the Java client libraries can be a bit tricky.
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When we use a tool like gcloud or IAP Desktop for the first time, we need to authorize it. Google Sign-in then shows us a consent screen that lists all the things the tool might do on our behalf, and we can decide whether to consent or deny. But sometimes, we get a third option.
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AWS lets us use access keys to authenticate programmatically. That’s useful for local development, or if we want to let tools access AWS on our behalf. The closest thing to access keys on Google Cloud seem to be service account keys. But are they really that similar?
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Before we deploy an application to Google Cloud, we typically want to test it locally. If the application uses Google Cloud APIs, then we somehow need to ensure that the application can authenticate. We could use a service account key for that, but there’s typically a better way.
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Previously, we explored two ways of authenticating to Google Cloud using Kerberos and NTLM credentials. Both ways involved authenticating to AD FS using Integrated Windows Authentication, and then using workload identity federation. But there’s a third way that we haven’t cover yet – and it involves using the SAML HTTP-POST binding.
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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 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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