Professional Cloud Security Engineer
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An enterprise operates a sensitive multi-tier financial application running across multiple namespaces on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). To comply with a zero-trust security framework, the architecture must satisfy two core requirements:
Which combination of controls should the security team implement to satisfy these requirements?
Apply a Cloud Service Mesh PeerAuthentication policy configured with PERMISSIVE mode, and configure Google Cloud VPC firewall rules referencing Compute Engine network tags.
Configure Cloud Service Mesh DestinationRule resources with DISABLE TLS mode, and enforce GKE node-to-node IPsec encryption using Cloud VPN tunnels.
Deploy Binary Authorization attestation policies to Pod admission controllers, and configure Google Cloud Armor security policies on internal HTTP(S) Load Balancers.
Apply a Cloud Service Mesh PeerAuthentication policy configured with STRICT mode, and implement Kubernetes NetworkPolicies targeting Pod labels and namespace selectors.
Apply a Cloud Service Mesh PeerAuthentication policy configured with PERMISSIVE mode, and configure Google Cloud VPC firewall rules referencing Compute Engine network tags.
Configure Cloud Service Mesh DestinationRule resources with DISABLE TLS mode, and enforce GKE node-to-node IPsec encryption using Cloud VPN tunnels.
Deploy Binary Authorization attestation policies to Pod admission controllers, and configure Google Cloud Armor security policies on internal HTTP(S) Load Balancers.
Apply a Cloud Service Mesh PeerAuthentication policy configured with STRICT mode, and implement Kubernetes NetworkPolicies targeting Pod labels and namespace selectors.
This architecture combines Cloud Service Mesh transport authentication controls with native Kubernetes NetworkPolicy resources to create a defense-in-depth, zero-trust boundary around containerized microservice tiers in GKE.
PeerAuthentication custom resource with spec.mtls.mode: STRICT (either across the mesh in the istio-system root namespace or per workload namespace) ensures that the sidecar proxies mandate mutual TLS. Plaintext traffic and unauthenticated requests are actively blocked at the application/transport layer.NetworkPolicy objects enforce container-level packet filtering. By leveraging podSelector and namespaceSelector, security teams specify exact ingress and egress whitelists, ensuring that only explicitly authorized Pods can establish network connections to sensitive backend tiers.Combining PeerAuthentication in STRICT mode with Kubernetes NetworkPolicies addresses both transport-layer data encapsulation and network-level microsegmentation. It prevents lateral movement from compromised Pods while guaranteeing that all in-flight microservice data is cryptographically secure.