gRPC Authentication with Cloud Run
or “how to secure and access your Serverless gRPC app on Cloud Run”
A couple months back I was happy to assist the Cloud Run (managed) team in validating gRPC support on that platform. The testing/validation covered writing a simple deployable gRPC client and server that also performed OpenIDConnect (OIDC) Authentication over gRPC (i.,e. Cloud Run Authentication). In the course of developing that, i gained an understanding of how gRPC authentication headers are handled and manged directly with gRPC. This article explains how to connect to a secure gRPC service running on Cloud Run using native gRPC library constructs.
The articles cited in the Reference section that discuss gRPC on Cloud Run but these do not cover either authentication at all or do not specify authentication using gRPC-centric constructs with Google Cloud Auth client libraries.
This article covers a simple client-server you can deploy on Cloud run that includes gRPC authentication using google cloud credentials . We specifically use ServiceAccount Credentials but the library cited below will work while running on GCE, GKE or even on Cloud Run itself.

you can find the source here:
OIDC Basics for GCP Services and gRPC
This article does not go into details about OpenID Connect tokens and how to use them with gRPC and GCP. However, as background please see
- gRPC Authentication with Google OpenID Connect tokens
- https://github.com/salrashid123/grpc_google_id_tokens
- Authenticating using Google OpenID Connect Tokens
The links above shows how to acquire Google OIDC tokens that you can use for a variety of GCP services or even standalone. One thing noted that not all google cloud auth libraries provide interfaces to get OIDC tokens. At the time of writing, only google-auth libraries for java and python are supported with nodejs pending and golang yet to be officially implemented. Furthermore, most of those languages that do support acquiring OIDC token happen to also support automatic injection into gRPC calls.
For golang (as in the code in this article), it does not yet 1) support getting google OIDC tokens and 2) using those tokens in a library directly with gRPC. This article provides an unsupported implementation of both (from google’s official perspective atleast):
The library set above for golang also implements a specific TokenSource that uses a source google identity to get its OIDC token as yet another standard TokenSource or Credentials. For implementation details, see IdTokenSource.
Furthermore, that TokenSource also implements the interfaces that gRPC understands natively. What that means is gRPC clients if given that tokens source will automatically acquire, use, referesh and manage the lifecycle of the OIDC token!
For details, the specific interface that does that for gRPC is:
// NewIDTokenRPCCredential returns a crdential object for use with gRPC clients
func NewIDTokenRPCCredential(ctx context.Context, tokenSource oauth2.TokenSource) (credentials.PerRPCCredentials, error) // GetRequestMetadata gets the request metadata as a map from a TokenSource.
func (ts TokenSource) GetRequestMetadata(ctx context.Context, uri ...string) (map[string]string, error)// RequireTransportSecurity indicates whether the credentials requires transport security.
func (ts TokenSource) RequireTransportSecurity() bool
As an example of direct usage of an IDToken with grpc native constructs like grpc.WithPerRPCCredentials():
data, _ := ioutil.ReadFile(*serviceAccount)
creds, _ := google.CredentialsFromJSON(ctx, data, scopes)idTokenSource, err := sal.IdTokenSource(
sal.IdTokenConfig{
Credentials: creds,
Audiences: []string{*targetAudience},
},
)rpcCreds, err := sal.NewIDTokenRPCCredential(ctx, idTokenSource)ce := credentials.NewTLS(&tlsCfg)
conn, err = grpc.Dial(*address,
grpc.WithTransportCredentials(ce),
grpc.WithPerRPCCredentials(rpcCreds))
For equivalent samples in other languages see gRPC Authentication with Google OpenID Connect tokens.
Or if you’d rather do all of it manually see “How to get a Google OIDC Token”
Anyway, lets go directly into the details
I’m assuming you have Cloud Run setup and relatively above with gRPC and the auth concepts cited above
Setup Env Vars
export PROJECT_ID=`gcloud config get-value core/project`
gcloud config set run/region us-central1
gcloud config set run/platform managedBuild and deploy gRPC Server Image
docker build -t gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/grpc_run_serve \
-f Dockerfile.server .
docker push gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/grpc_run_serve
gcloud beta run deploy grpc \
--image gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/grpc_run_serveCreate Client SA
Now create the service account that will have access to invoke the Cloud Run service
mkdir -p certs
cd certs
gcloud iam service-accounts create grpc-client-account \
--display-name "gRPC Client Service Account"
gcloud iam service-accounts keys create certs/grpc_client.json \
--iam-account=grpc-client-account@$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.comSet IAM Permission for roles/run.invoker:
cat <<EOT >> iam_policy.json
bindings:
- members:
- serviceAccount:grpc-client-account@$PROJECT_ID.iam.gserviceaccount.com
role: roles/run.invoker
version: 1
EOTgcloud beta run services set-iam-policy grpc iam_policy.json
Build Client
At this point, the gRPC service is secure by default and would require an OIDC token with the correct audience field and IAM permissions to get through
The audience filed for cloud run needs to be the fully qualified name with the protocol (custom domain aud fields is currently not supported)
export AUDIENCE=`gcloud beta run services describe grpc --format="value(status.address.hostname)"`
export ADDRESS=`echo $AUDIENCE | awk -F[/:] '{print $4}'`On the root folder of this repo, run:
docker build -t gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/grpc_run_client \
-f Dockerfile.client .RUN gRPC Client
Now run the grpc client and specify the serviceAccount json file that is mounted inside the container (note: you should cd to the root of this repo so that the path to certs/ is mounted):
docker run -v `pwd`/certs:/certs \
-t gcr.io/$PROJECT_ID/grpc_run_client \
--address $ADDRESS:443 --usetls=true \
--servername $ADDRESS --audience $AUDIENCE \
--serviceAccount /certs/grpc_client.jsonThe output of grpc_run_client will show the OIDC token sent to the cloud run instance which you can decode at jwt.io. Note the aud:, email and iss fields
{
"iss": "https://accounts.google.com",
"aud": "https://grpc-6w42z6vi3q-uc.a.run.app",
"azp": "grpc-client-account@mineral-minutia-820.iam.gserviceaccount.com",
"sub": "101659512549165144150",
"email": "grpc-client-account@mineral-minutia-820.iam.gserviceaccount.com",
"email_verified": true,
"iat": 1572983749,
"exp": 1572987349
}The second portion is 5 unary responses back from the GRPC service that displays the K_REVISION env variable from Cloud RUn
2019/11/05 20:52:14 RPC Response: 0 message:"Hello unary RPC msg from K_REVISION grpc-tnslx"
2019/11/05 20:52:15 RPC Response: 1 message:"Hello unary RPC msg from K_REVISION grpc-tnslx"
2019/11/05 20:52:16 RPC Response: 2 message:"Hello unary RPC msg from K_REVISION grpc-tnslx"
2019/11/05 20:52:17 RPC Response: 3 message:"Hello unary RPC msg from K_REVISION grpc-tnslx"
2019/11/05 20:52:18 RPC Response: 4 message:"Hello unary RPC msg from K_REVISION grpc-tnslx"The final output is a buffered form Server-side Streaming messages back (i.,e the server sends back two responses back on the single request). At the time of writing 11/5/19, server streaming is not officially supported as its not true streaming but a buffered response anyway
2019/11/05 20:52:18 Stream Header: %!(EXTRA metadata.MD=map[alt-svc:[quic=":443"; ma=2592000; v="46,43",h3-Q049=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q048=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q046=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q043=":443"; ma=2592000] content-type:[application/grpc] streamheaderkey:[val] x-cloud-trace-context:[7928b8ab5aa6b2dc759ca6ff7fa5bb4c] date:[Tue, 05 Nov 2019 20:52:19 GMT] server:[Google Frontend] content-length:[52]])2019/11/05 20:52:18 Message: %!(EXTRA string=Msg1 Stream RPC msg)2019/11/05 20:52:18 Stream Header: %!(EXTRA metadata.MD=map[date:[Tue, 05 Nov 2019 20:52:19 GMT] server:[Google Frontend] content-length:[52] alt-svc:[quic=":443"; ma=2592000; v="46,43",h3-Q049=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q048=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q046=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-Q043=":443"; ma=2592000] content-type:[application/grpc] streamheaderkey:[val] x-cloud-trace-context:[7928b8ab5aa6b2dc759ca6ff7fa5bb4c]])2019/11/05 20:52:18 Message: %!(EXTRA string=Msg2 Stream RPC msg)2019/11/05 20:52:18 Stream Trailer: map[]
enjoy cloudrunning!
References
Cloud Run
Misc
- Calling Cloud Composer to Cloud Functions and back again, securely
- Automatic OIDC: Using Cloud Scheduler, Tasks, and PubSub to make authenticated calls to Cloud Run, Cloud Functions or your Server
- Authorizing access to Cloud Run for Anthos deployed on GKE services using Istio
- Authenticating end users of Cloud Run for Anthos deployed on GKE services using Istio and Identity Platform
