How to enable Uniform Bucket-level Access for Bucket in Google Cloud

Priyam Singh

~ 2 min read

Enabling uniform bucket level access enforces stricter permissions on buckets and objects within. In the absence of uniform level access, bucket policies have to be carefully written to ensure object level access is not obtained.

Introduction

It is recommended to use uniform bucket-level access to unify and simplify how you grant access to your Cloud Storage resources. Cloud Storage offers two systems for granting users permission to access your buckets and objects: Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) and Access Control Lists (ACLs). These systems act in parallel - in order for a user to access a Cloud Storage resource, only one of the systems needs to grant the user permission. Cloud IAM is used throughout Google Cloud and allows you to grant a variety of permissions at the bucket and project levels. ACLs are used only by Cloud Storage and have limited permission options, but they allow you to grant permissions on a per-object basis.

In order to support a uniform permissioning system, Cloud Storage has uniform bucket-level access. Using this feature disables ACLs for all Cloud Storage resources: access to Cloud Storage resources then is granted exclusively through Cloud IAM. Enabling uniform bucket-level access guarantees that if a Storage bucket is not publicly accessible, no object in the bucket is publicly accessible either.

Steps to enable uniform Bucket-level Access for Bucket using Console

  1. Open the Cloud Storage browser in the Google Cloud Console

  2. In the list of buckets, click on the name of the desired bucket.

  3. Select the Permissions tab near the top of the page.

    GCP bucket permissions

  4. In the text box in which it is written as Access control click Switch to Uniform GCP bucket permissions

  5. In the pop-up menu that appears, select Uniform

    GCP bucket uniform permissions

  6. Select the Add project role ACLs to the bucket IAM policy checkbox

    Add project role ACLs to the bucket IAM policy

  7. Click Save

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