Live data from Hacker News

Google Identity-Aware Proxy

cloud.google.com

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#11

What is a difference between proxy and a VPN?

Traditionally a VPN operates at the IP layer, while a proxy operates at the application layer. For example, a VPN will provide an IP route that you can send any kind of packets over, while an HTTP proxy speaks the actual HTTP protocol and makes HTTP requests on your behalf.

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#12

What is a difference between proxy and a VPN?

layering differences aside, there's a fairly important security difference here:

Because the proxy is examining requests, it can authorize them, and provide data to the back-end about what user was authenticated. A VPN usually just gets you onto the network, and doesn't provide much if any data to the service being accessed about what user and application is connecting.

A VPN is generally invisible to both sides of the communication, so you can tack on extra security, but it's harder to have the applications actually rely on it for authn/authz guarantees. In practice this means you have to log in twice: Once to the VPN, and again to the application. There's some ways to make that invisible to the user, though.

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#14
post #9

As you can sort-of see from the linked site, this is a public version of what Google uses internally, which is called BeyondCorp[0]. It's really an amazing way to think about security for a company. If you deploy it universally across your company, VPNs become obsolete. This solves a popular attack vector where bad-actors just need to get onto a corporate network to do damage. If you can authenticate at every service…

As far as I remember BeyondCorp required users to be equipped only with attested hardware (no BYOD). This device's health then was constantly being monitored and taken into account when granting / denying access. I'd like to see the differences between IAP and Google's internal BeyondCorp. Quick search did not reveal anything.

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#15
post #14
post #9

As you can sort-of see from the linked site, this is a public version of what Google uses internally, which is called BeyondCorp[0]. It's really an amazing way to think about security for a company. If you deploy it universally across your company, VPNs become obsolete. This solves a popular attack vector where bad-actors just need to get onto a corporate network to do damage. If you can authenticate at every service…

As far as I remember BeyondCorp required users to be equipped only with attested hardware (no BYOD). This device's health then was constantly being monitored and taken into account when granting / denying access. I'd like to see the differences between IAP and Google's internal BeyondCorp. Quick search did not reveal anything.

The only BYOD device allowed is Chromebooks with a signed bootloader, aka no developer mode or Crouton.

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#16
post #14
post #9

As you can sort-of see from the linked site, this is a public version of what Google uses internally, which is called BeyondCorp[0]. It's really an amazing way to think about security for a company. If you deploy it universally across your company, VPNs become obsolete. This solves a popular attack vector where bad-actors just need to get onto a corporate network to do damage. If you can authenticate at every service…

As far as I remember BeyondCorp required users to be equipped only with attested hardware (no BYOD). This device's health then was constantly being monitored and taken into account when granting / denying access. I'd like to see the differences between IAP and Google's internal BeyondCorp. Quick search did not reveal anything.

Part of the announcement was that additional contextual auth capabilities would be added.

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#17
post #14
post #9

As you can sort-of see from the linked site, this is a public version of what Google uses internally, which is called BeyondCorp[0]. It's really an amazing way to think about security for a company. If you deploy it universally across your company, VPNs become obsolete. This solves a popular attack vector where bad-actors just need to get onto a corporate network to do damage. If you can authenticate at every service…

As far as I remember BeyondCorp required users to be equipped only with attested hardware (no BYOD). This device's health then was constantly being monitored and taken into account when granting / denying access. I'd like to see the differences between IAP and Google's internal BeyondCorp. Quick search did not reveal anything.

I think that's why the describe this as "...a building block toward BeyondCorp..." We'd pay for them to develop a service that did the whole 9 yards (multi-platform agents, CA, client-certs, etc.).

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#19

I'm super happy to see this. Square uses something similar for employee access to our datacenter, and I hope more people follow this trend. It's one of the annoying parts of open-sourcing our infrastructure -- we can't generally assume folks have an authenticating proxy around. With a few examples in the wild, I'll be happy to start doing that. We use mutually-authenticated TLS (ie, the proxy presents a client cert t…

Have you seen https://github.com/bitly/oauth2_proxy?

Re: Google Identity-Aware Proxy

#20
Happy to see BeyondCorp start to catch on. We've been champions for a while at ScaleFT. In fact, we're hosting a BeyondCorp Meetup tonight in SF. There will be a couple talks on the subject that should be of interest to folks here. It's an open event with RSVP, so come by if you're around.

https://www.meetup.com/BeyondCorpSF/events/238062984/

Post reply on HN