Cloud Run IAM & security

Cloud Run uses Identity and Access Management (IAM) to secure your resources and control who can deploy or invoke them.

Predefined IAM Roles

Types of service accounts for service identity

Cloud Run resources run as a specific service account (the service identity).

• User-managed service account (recommended): You manually create this service account and determine the most minimal set of permissions that the service account needs to access specific Google Cloud resources. The user-managed service account follows the format of SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME@PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com.

• Compute Engine default service account: Cloud Run automatically provides the Compute Engine default service account as the default service identity. The Compute Engine default service account follows the format of PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com.

Best practices

By default, the Compute Engine default service account is automatically created. If you don't specify a service account when the Cloud Run service or job is created, Cloud Run uses this service account. Depending on your organization policy configuration, the default service account might automatically be granted the Editor role on your project. We strongly recommend that you disable the automatic role grant by enforcing the iam.automaticIamGrantsForDefaultServiceAccounts organization policy constraint. If you created your organization after May 3, 2024, this constraint is enforced by default.

Create a user-managed service account with minimal permissions for each Cloud Run resource.

To allow a service to access another GCP resource (e.g., Cloud SQL), grant the service's identity the appropriate IAM role on that resource.

Security controls

• Ingress Settings: Control whether your service is reachable from the internet (all), only from within the VPC (internal), or via a load balancer (internal-and-cloud-load-balancing).

• VPC Egress: Use a VPC connector or Direct VPC egress to allow Cloud Run to access resources in your VPC.

• Binary Authorization: Ensure only trusted container images are deployed.

• Secrets Management: Use Secret Manager to securely pass sensitive information (e.g., API keys, database passwords) to your containers as environment variables or volumes.

Public access

There are two ways to create a public Cloud Run service, you can either:

• Disable the Cloud Run Invoker IAM check (recommended).
• Assign the Cloud Run Invoker IAM role to the allUsers member type.

For more information, see: Cloud Run security overview.

Configure IAP to secure access

By enabling IAP on Cloud Run directly, you can secure traffic with a single click from all ingress paths, including default run.app URLs and load balancers.

When you integrate IAP with Cloud Run, you can manage user or group access in the following ways:

• Inside the organization - configure access to users who are within the same organization as your Cloud Run service

• Outside the organization - configure access to users who are from organizations different than your Cloud Run service

• No organization - configure access in projects that are not part of any Google organization

Enabling IAP on a Cloud Run service can be as easy as deploying a new service with the following flags:

gcloud run deploy SERVICE_NAME \
  --region=REGION \
  --image=IMAGE_URL \
  --no-allow-unauthenticated \
  --iap \
  --quiet