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Google Reveals Own Security Regime Policy Trusts No Network, Ever (theregister.co.uk)
Darren Pauli, reporting for The Register: Google sees little distinction between boardrooms and bars, cubicles and coffee shops; all are untrusted under its perimeter-less security model detailed in a paper published this week. The "BeyondCorp model" under development for more than five years is a zero-trust network model where the user is king and log in location means little. Staff devices including laptops and phones are logged into a device inventory service which contains trust information and snapshots of the devices at a given time. Employees are awarded varying levels of trust provided they meet minimum criteria which authors Barclay Osborn, Justin McWilliams, Betsy Beyer, and Max Saltonst all say reduces maintenance cost and improves device usability (PDF).
Trust No Network Ever.
Way back in the day a company I worked for had done a good job securing our network...
Until a developer went to a conference and plugged his network in the hotel network then brought it back inside our firewall.
We did catch the problem very quickly and only a few machines where infected but we locked things down even more after that.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This month's issue of ;Login (Usenix publication) had a very nice write up about this.
Must be great to live in a world where this abstract crap passes as a policy framework.... it seems they've basically described a full SCCM setup with some network level SSO that can be implemented using a variety of technologies (802.1x to more proprietary stuff offered by network vendors) so what's new here?
If you trust them, they suddenly shut down and brick your devices. And this is just one of their own networks - Nest.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Good employee, have another byte
clear pass?
This doesn't change the fact that GOOGLE THEMSELVES ARE SPYING ON YOU. And they are profiting mightily from it.
I trust no Google product on my network, ever.
The summary says "Employees are awarded varying levels of trust provided they meet minimum criteria". That should say "employee devices...". Employees, of course, do have differing levels of access to various resources, based on the needs of their jobs, with very fine-grained access control. But the criteria-based trust the article is talking about varies based on device, not user. For example, because my phone isn't "fully trusted" (because I don't want to accept the authentication and other requirements that would impose), it can't access the bug report database or the code repositories, but it does have access to the employee directory, my company e-mail and calendar, etc. My laptop is fully trusted because of how it's configured and I can use it to look at anything I'm authorized to see.
The key point, though, is that all of this is completely network-independent. It doesn't matter if I'm connected directly to an internal LAN or sitting in a coffee shop, my access, based on my device and my authenticated identity, is the same. Google does still have VPN infrastructure for some legacy services that haven't been fully migrated to the perimeter-less architecture, but that's being phased out as those services are upgraded or replaced. I only use my VPN client a few times per year, and eventually I need it at all.
This is basically how University networks work.
PRISM has everything going in and out of Google anyways.
crunchy on the outside, but soft and chewy on the inside!
Hurr durr I'm the most paranoid
Are they just locking u out or locking themselves in? A rhetorical question as it must be both. Google is a cult. They do great things but a lot of it us just for themselves. You fund them through adwords. For the pleasure of watching their insider cult end of year videos that are also all about them and their buddies and witnessing their moonshot projects and private google plex busses. Its a big frat party.