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Use custom organization policies for service accounts and service account keys

Google Cloud Organization Policy gives you centralized, programmatic control over your organization's resources. As the organization policy administrator, you can define an organization policy, which is a set of restrictions called constraints that apply to Google Cloud resources and descendants of those resources in the Google Cloud resource hierarchy. You can enforce organization policies at the organization, folder, or project level.

Organization Policy provides predefined constraints for various Google Cloud services. However, if you want more granular, customizable control over the specific fields that are restricted in your organization policies, you can also create custom organization policies.

Benefits

You can use custom organization policies to allow or deny specific operations on service accounts and service account keys. For example, you can set a policy to deny the creation of a key with a certain origin, causing any requests to create a key with that origin to fail and return an error to the user.

Policy inheritance

By default, organization policies are inherited by the descendants of the resources on which you enforce the policy. For example, if you enforce a policy on a folder, Google Cloud enforces the policy on all projects in the folder. To learn more about this behavior and how to change it, refer to Hierarchy evaluation rules.

Before you begin

Required roles

To get the permissions that you need to manage organization policies, ask your administrator to grant you the Organization policy administrator (roles/orgpolicy.policyAdmin) IAM role on the organization. For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

This predefined role contains the permissions required to manage organization policies. To see the exact permissions that are required, expand the Required permissions section:

Required permissions

The following permissions are required to manage organization policies:

You might also be able to get these permissions with custom roles or other predefined roles.

Create a custom constraint

A custom constraint is defined in a YAML file by the resources, methods, conditions, and actions that are supported by the service on which you are enforcing the organization policy. Conditions for your custom constraints are defined using Common Expression Language (CEL). For more information about how to build conditions in custom constraints using CEL, see the CEL section of Creating and managing custom constraints.

To create a YAML file for a custom constraint:

name: organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/customConstraints/CONSTRAINT_NAME
resourceTypes:
- iam.googleapis.com/RESOURCE_TYPE
methodTypes:
- CREATE
- UPDATE
condition: "CONDITION"
actionType: ACTION
displayName: DISPLAY_NAME
description: DESCRIPTION

Replace the following:

  • ORGANIZATION_ID: your organization ID, such as 123456789.

  • CONSTRAINT_NAME: the name you want for your new custom constraint. A custom constraint must start with custom., and can only include uppercase letters, lowercase letters, or numbers, for example, custom.denyServiceAccountCreation. The maximum length of this field is 70 characters, not counting the prefix, for example, organizations/123456789/customConstraints/custom.

  • RESOURCE_TYPE: the name (not the URI) of the Identity and Access Management API REST resource containing the object and field you want to restrict. For example, iam.googleapis.com/ServiceAccount.

    • CONDITION: a CEL condition that is written against a representation of a supported service resource. This field has a maximum length of 1000 characters. See Supported resources for more information about the resources available to write conditions against. For example, "resource.description.contains('INVALID_DESCRIPTION')".

  • ACTION: the action to take if the condition is met. This can be either ALLOW or DENY.

  • DISPLAY_NAME: a human-friendly name for the constraint. This field has a maximum length of 200 characters.

  • DESCRIPTION: a human-friendly description of the constraint to display as an error message when the policy is violated. This field has a maximum length of 2000 characters.

    • For more information about how to create a custom constraint, see Defining custom constraints.

    Set up a custom constraint

    Console

    To create a custom constraint, do the following:

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Organization policies page.

      Go to Organization policies

    2. From the project picker, select the project that you want to set the organization policy for.
    3. Click Custom constraint.
    4. In the Display name box, enter a human-readable name for the constraint. This name is used in error messages and can be used for identification and debugging. Don't use personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive data in display names because this name could be exposed in error messages. This field can contain up to 200 characters.
    5. In the Constraint ID box, enter the ID that you want for your new custom constraint. A custom constraint can only contain letters (including upper and lowercase) or numbers, for example custom.denyServiceAccountCreation. This field can contain up to 70 characters, not counting the prefix (custom.), for example, organizations/123456789/customConstraints/custom. Don't include PII or sensitive data in your constraint ID, because it could be exposed in error messages.
    6. In the Description box, enter a human-readable description of the constraint. This description is used as an error message when the policy is violated. Include details about why the policy violation occurred and how to resolve the policy violation. Don't include PII or sensitive data in your description, because it could be exposed in error messages. This field can contain up to 2000 characters.
    7. In the Resource type box, select the name of the Google Cloud REST resource containing the object and field that you want to restrict—for example, container.googleapis.com/NodePool. Most resource types support up to 20 custom constraints. If you attempt to create more custom constraints, the operation fails.
    8. This constraint can only be enforced on the REST CREATE method.

      9. To see supported methods for each service, find the service in Services that support custom constraints.

    9. To define a condition, click Edit condition.
      1. In the Add condition panel, create a CEL condition that refers to a supported service resource, for example, resource.management.autoUpgrade == false. This field can contain up to 1000 characters. For details about CEL usage, see Common Expression Language. For more information about the service resources you can use in your custom constraints, see Custom constraint supported services.
      2. Click Save.
    10. Under Action, select whether to allow or deny the evaluated method if the condition is met.

      11. The deny action means that the operation to create or update the resource is blocked if the condition evaluates to true.

      The allow action means that the operation to create or update the resource is permitted only if the condition evaluates to true. Every other case except those explicitly listed in the condition is blocked.

    11. Click Create constraint.

      12. When you have entered a value into each field, the equivalent YAML configuration for this custom constraint appears on the right.

    gcloud

  • To create a custom constraint, create a YAML file using the following format: 
    • name: organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/customConstraints/CONSTRAINT_NAME
resourceTypes: RESOURCE_NAME
methodTypes:
  - CREATE
condition: "CONDITION"
actionType: ACTION
displayName: DISPLAY_NAME
description: DESCRIPTION

    Replace the following:

  • ORGANIZATION_ID: your organization ID, such as 123456789.
  • CONSTRAINT_NAME: the name that you want for your new custom constraint. A custom constraint can only contain letters (including upper and lowercase) or numbers, for example, custom.denyServiceAccountCreation. This field can contain up to 70 characters, not counting the prefix (custom.)— for example, organizations/123456789/customConstraints/custom. Don't include PII or sensitive data in your constraint ID, because it could be exposed in error messages.
  • RESOURCE_NAME: the fully qualified name of the Google Cloud resource containing the object and field that you want to restrict. For example, iam.googleapis.com/ServiceAccount. Most resource types support up to 20 custom constraints. If you attempt to create more custom constraints, the operation fails.
  • methodTypes: the REST methods that the constraint is enforced on. Can only be CREATE.

    • To see the supported methods for each service, find the service in Services that support custom constraints.

    CONDITION: a CEL condition that is written against a representation of a supported service resource. This field can contain up to 1000 characters. For example, "resource.description.contains('INVALID_DESCRIPTION')".

    For more information about the resources available to write conditions against, see Supported resources.

  • ACTION: the action to take if the condition is met. Can only be ALLOW.

    • The allow action means that if the condition evaluates to true, the operation to create or update the resource is permitted. This also means that every other case except the one explicitly listed in the condition is blocked.

  • DISPLAY_NAME: a human-readable name for the constraint. This name is used in error messages and can be used for identification and debugging. Don't use PII or sensitive data in display names because this name could be exposed in error messages. This field can contain up to 200 characters.
  • DESCRIPTION: a human-friendly description of the constraint to display as an error message when the policy is violated. This field can contain up to 2000 characters.
  • After you have created the YAML file for a new custom constraint, you must set it up to make it available for organization policies in your organization. To set up a custom constraint, use the gcloud org-policies set-custom-constraint command: 
    • gcloud org-policies set-custom-constraint CONSTRAINT_PATH

    Replace CONSTRAINT_PATH with the full path to your custom constraint file. For example, /home/user/customconstraint.yaml.

    After this operation is complete, your custom constraints are available as organization policies in your list of Google Cloud organization policies.

  • To verify that the custom constraint exists, use the gcloud org-policies list-custom-constraints command: 
    • gcloud org-policies list-custom-constraints --organization=ORGANIZATION_ID

    Replace ORGANIZATION_ID with the ID of your organization resource.

    For more information, see Viewing organization policies.

    Enforce a custom organization policy

    You can enforce a constraint by creating an organization policy that references it, and then applying that organization policy to a Google Cloud resource.

    Console

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Organization policies page.

      Go to Organization policies

    2. From the project picker, select the project that you want to set the organization policy for.
    3. From the list on the Organization policies page, select your constraint to view the Policy details page for that constraint.
    4. To configure the organization policy for this resource, click Manage policy.
    5. On the Edit policy page, select Override parent's policy.
    6. Click Add a rule.
    7. In the Enforcement section, select whether this organization policy is enforced or not.
    8. Optional: To make the organization policy conditional on a tag, click Add condition. Note that if you add a conditional rule to an organization policy, you must add at least one unconditional rule or the policy cannot be saved. For more information, see Scope organization policies with tags.
    9. Click Test changes to simulate the effect of the organization policy. For more information, see Test organization policy changes with Policy Simulator.
    10. To enforce the organization policy in dry-run mode, click Set dry run policy. For more information, see Test organization policies.
    11. After you verify that the organization policy in dry-run mode works as intended, set the live policy by clicking Set policy.

    gcloud

    1. To create an organization policy with boolean rules, create a policy YAML file that references the constraint: 
      2. name: projects/PROJECT_ID/policies/CONSTRAINT_NAME
spec:
  rules:
  - enforce: true

dryRunSpec:
  rules:
  - enforce: true

      Replace the following:

      • PROJECT_ID: the project that you want to enforce your constraint on.
      • CONSTRAINT_NAME: the name you defined for your custom constraint. For example, custom.denyServiceAccountCreation.
    2. To enforce the organization policy in dry-run mode, run the following command with the dryRunSpec flag: 
      3. gcloud org-policies set-policy POLICY_PATH --update-mask=dryRunSpec

      Replace POLICY_PATH with the full path to your organization policy YAML file. The policy requires up to 15 minutes to take effect.

    3. After you verify that the organization policy in dry-run mode works as intended, set the live policy with the org-policies set-policy command and the spec flag: 
      4. gcloud org-policies set-policy POLICY_PATH --update-mask=spec

      Replace POLICY_PATH with the full path to your organization policy YAML file. The policy requires up to 15 minutes to take effect.

    Test the custom organization policy

    Optionally, you can test the organization policy by setting the policy and then trying to take an action that the policy should prevent.

    This section describes how to test the following organization policy constraint:

    name: organizations/ORG_ID/customConstraints/custom.denyServiceAccountCreation
resourceTypes: iam.googleapis.com/ServiceAccount
methodTypes:
  - CREATE
  - UPDATE
condition:
  "resource.description.contains('INVALID_DESCRIPTION')"
actionType: DENY
displayName: Do not allow service account with INVALID_DESCRIPTION to be created.

    If you want to test this custom constraint, do the following:

    1. Copy the constraint into a YAML file and replace the following values:

    2. Set up the custom constraint and enforce it for the project that you created to test the custom organization policy constraint.

    3. Ensure that you have the Create Service Accounts role (roles/iam.serviceAccountCreator).

    4. Try to create a service account with the description you included in the custom constraint. Before running the command, replace the following values:

    gcloud iam service-accounts create SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME \
    --description="INVALID_DESCRIPTION" --display-name="DISPLAY_NAME"

    The output is the following:

    Operation denied by custom org policy: ["customConstraints/custom.denyServiceAccountCreation": "Do not allow service account with INVALID_DESCRIPTION to be created."]

    Identity and Access Management supported resources and operations

    The following service account and service account key custom constraint fields are available to use when you create or update an account or key.

    Example custom organization policies for common use cases

    The following table provides the syntax of some custom constraints for common use cases:

    For more information about CEL macros available for use in custom constraint conditions, see Common Expression Language.

    Description Constraint syntax
    Disable service account creation. 
        name: organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/customConstraints/custom.disableServiceAccountCreation
    resourceTypes:
    - iam.googleapis.com/ServiceAccount
    methodTypes:
    - CREATE
    condition: "True"
    actionType: DENY
    displayName: Deny all service account creation.
    Disable service account key creation. 
        name: organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/customConstraints/custom.disableServiceAccountKeyCreation
    resourceTypes:
    - iam.googleapis.com/ServiceAccountKey
    methodTypes:
    - CREATE
    condition: "resource.keyType == USER_MANAGED && resource.keyOrigin == GOOGLE_PROVIDED"
    actionType: DENY
    displayName: Deny all service account key creation.
    Disable service account key upload. 
        name: organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID/customConstraints/custom.disableServiceAccountKeyUpload
    resourceTypes:
    - iam.googleapis.com/ServiceAccountKey
    methodTypes:
    - CREATE
    condition: "resource.keyType == USER_MANAGED && resource.keyOrigin == USER_PROVIDED"
    actionType: DENY
    displayName: Deny all service account key uploads.

    What's next