Google Announces New Security Features at Cloud Security Summit

Highlights:

• The conference unveiled new Security Command Center features, such as the capacity to identify hazardous combinations that have never been observed before, which lead to weaknesses and provide access to essential resources.
• Google revealed new private virtual machine (VM) solutions in preview for data security. They employ hardware-based memory encryption to safeguard running apps and data.

Google LLC announced new security features at the annual Google Cloud Security Summit. The development emphasizes innovating cyber security by leveraging the power of convergence.

The annual conference’s focus was convergence, with Google purposefully selecting strategic capabilities that can have the most prominent effects on security programs and posture. These capabilities are focused on enabling a platform that combines risk management and the essential security activities of detection, investigation, and response for locations where business-critical applications and data are becoming more and more prevalent.

To create a solid security foundation, Google described the broader market and how Google Security Operations enables initiatives like hackathons and new procedures, with a dash of artificial intelligence tossed in for good measure. More precisely, Mandiant Custom Threat Hunt, enhanced security command center features, and Chrome Enterprise Premium upgrades are the three primary new capabilities that Google Security revealed.

Mandiant Custom Threat Hunt provides point-in-time threat-hunting capabilities to support managed detection and response services. The service enhances an organization’s capacity to identify potential threats by helping it identify past and present threat actor behavior in the environment. It can also supplement in-house threat-hunting tools.

The conference unveiled new Security Command Center features, such as the capacity to identify hazardous combinations that have never been observed before, which lead to weaknesses and provide access to essential resources. With the change, Google refers to “virtual red teaming” by the SCC to identify harmful combinations. To identify potential attack routes, it repeatedly simulates a determined attacker who tries millions of attack permutations against a digital twin model of a specific cloud environment.

Additionally, the new SCC version is intended to improve entitlement management capabilities for multi-cloud architecture, assist customers in managing cloud identities, and uphold a least privilege access paradigm.

The third noteworthy item is the improvement of Chrome Enterprise Premium, which brings additional features. Pay-as-you-go pricing allows customers to acquire faster and more convenient protections; watermarking protects data; URL filtering for browser history gives users better visibility into browsing activities; and Chrome Security Insights provides a more comprehensive understanding of threats.

A number of new capabilities and controls designed to enhance the corporate security posture and guarantee compliance were also unveiled at the summit.

A now-in-preview system for identity access and management, Privileged Access Manager implements approval-based, time-bound, and just-in-time access elevations for high-privilege users, thereby upholding the principle of least privilege. Principal Access Boundary defines permitted resource sets for principals without active IAM policies.

Currently available to the public, Workforce Identity Federation with Microsoft Entra ID allows Single-Sign-On access to Google BigQuery from Microsoft Power BI without the need for user or group provisioning in Google Cloud, and Certificate-Based Access uses mutual TLS to bind user credentials to a device certificate. Furthermore, private IP is now supported by VPC Service Controls, allowing traffic from particular internal networks or on-premises settings to access protected cloud resources.

Google revealed new private virtual machine (VM) solutions in preview for data security. They employ hardware-based memory encryption to protect data and running apps.

AMD SEV-SNP, on the other hand, improves data confidentiality and integrity with robust memory integrity and hardware-rooted remote attestation. It is generally available on N2D machines and in preview on C3D instances. Furthermore, access transparency and reasons for Cloud HSM-based keys are provided by Key Access reasons for Cloud HSM, which is now in preview with Assured Workloads.