Control: 1.5 Ensure That Service Account Has No Admin Privileges

Description

A service account is a special Google account that belongs to an application or a VM, instead of to an individual end-user. The application uses the service account to call the service's Google API so that users aren't directly involved. It's recommended not to use admin access for ServiceAccount.

Service accounts represent service-level security of the Resources (application or a VM) which can be determined by the roles assigned to it. Enrolling ServiceAccount with Admin rights gives full access to an assigned application or a VM. A ServiceAccount Access holder can perform critical actions like delete, update change settings, etc. without user intervention. For this reason, it's recommended that service accounts not have Admin rights.

Remediation

From Console

1. Go to IAM & admin/IAM using https://console.cloud.google.com/iam-admin/iam.
2. Under the IAM Tab look for VIEW BY PRINCIPALS.
3. Filter PRINCIPALS using type : Service account.
4. Look for the Service Account with the Principal nomenclature:SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME@PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com.
5. Identify User-Managed user created service account with roles containing *Admin or *admin or role matching Editor or role matching Owner under Role Column.
6. Click on Edit (Pencil Icon) for the Service Account, it will open all the roles which are assigned to the Service Account.
7. Click the Delete bin icon to remove the role from the Principal (service account in this case).

From Command Line

gcloud projects get-iam-policy PROJECT_ID --format json > iam.json

1. Using a text editor, Remove Role which contains roles/*Admin or roles/*admin or matched =roles/editor or matches roles/owner. Add a role to the bindings array that defines the group members and the role for those members.

For example, to grant the role roles/appengine.appViewer to the ServiceAccount which is roles/editor, you would change the example shown below as follows:

  {
    "bindings": [
    {
      "members": [
        "serviceAccount:our-project-123@appspot.gserviceaccount.com",
      ],
      "role": "roles/appengine.appViewer"
    },
    {
      "members": [
        "user:email1@gmail.com"
      ],
      "role": "roles/owner"
    },
    {
      "members": [
        "serviceAccount:our-project-123@appspot.gserviceaccount.com",
        "serviceAccount:123456789012-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com"
      ],
      "role": "roles/editor"
    }
    ],
    "etag": "BwUjMhCsNvY="
  }

2. Update the project's IAM policy:

gcloud projects set-iam-policy PROJECT_ID iam.json

Default Value

User Managed (and not user-created) default service accounts have the Editor (roles/editor) role assigned to them to support GCP services they offer. By default, there are no roles assigned to User Managed User created service accounts.