About

Forseti Security is a collection of community-driven, open-source tools to help you improve the security of your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments. Forseti consists of core modules that you can enable, configure, and execute independently of each other. Community contributors are also developing add-on modules to offer unique capabilities. Forseti’s core modules work together, and provide a foundation that others can build upon.

Get started with Forseti Security.

View the Forseti Roadmap to learn about upcoming features.


When to use Forseti Security

Forseti Security makes sense when you need Security at Scale. It’s easy to monitor a few resources in one or two projects, but at some point manual checking does not work anymore. If you want to systematically monitor your GCP resources to ensure that access controls are set as you intended, Forseti will allow creating rule-based policies to codify your security stance. Then, if something changes unexpectedly, action will be taken including notifying you, and possibly automatically reverting to a known state.

Taken as a whole, Forseti allows you to ensure your security is governed by consistent, intelligible rules.

How Forseti Security works

When you install Forseti Security, you deploy the core Forseti Security modules and configure them to take a snapshot of your GCP resources, monitor those resources, and notify you of access policy changes.

Inventory

Inventory saves an inventory snapshot of your GCP resources to Cloud SQL, so you have a historical record of what was in your cloud. With this, you can understand all the resources you have in GCP and take action to conserve resources, reduce cost, and minimize security exposure. Inventory can be configured to run as often as you want, and send email notifications when it updates your resource snapshot

Scanner

Scanner uses the information collected by Forseti Inventory to regularly compare role-based access policies for your GCP resources. Scanner applies rules to audit GCP resources like the following:

With Scanner, you can specify users, groups, and domains that are allowed, mandatory, or excluded from resources and ensure that these access policies stay consistent. If it finds any access policies that don’t match your Scanner rules, it can save those rule violations to Cloud SQL or to Cloud Storage. This helps protect you against unsafe or unintentional changes.

Enforcer

Enforcer uses policies you create to compare the current state of your Compute Engine firewall to the desired state. Enforcer is an on-demand command-line tool that compares policies in batch mode over all managed projects or against selected projects. If it finds any differences in policy, Enforcer uses Google Cloud APIs to make changes and displays the output of the results. Policies can apply to individual projects or you can use an organization default policy.

The tool can also:

Explain

The Explain add-on module provides visibility into your Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) policies. Explain can help you understand:

Email Notifications

When configured, Forseti Security can send email notifications for Inventory and Scanner using the SendGrid API. SendGrid is currently the only supported email provider.