Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam

Which feature of Google Cloud can help to prevent unauthorized queries to BigQuery tables?

1. Cloud Storage bucket policies

2. Service account impersonation

3. Authorized IP address restrictions

4. Firewall rules set at the network level

The correct answer is: Authorized IP address restrictions

The feature of Google Cloud that can help prevent unauthorized queries to BigQuery tables is authorized IP address restrictions. By implementing IP address restrictions, you can limit access to BigQuery resources to only those requests originating from specified IP addresses. This adds an additional layer of security by ensuring that only approved networks can send queries to your BigQuery tables, thereby mitigating the risk of unauthorized access from other potentially malicious or untrusted sources. While the other options relate to security measures, they do not specifically address the access control required for BigQuery. For example, Cloud Storage bucket policies control access to Cloud Storage resources, service account impersonation pertains to allowing users to act on behalf of a service account (which is more about credential management than access restriction), and firewall rules are typically focused on controlling network traffic at a broader level and do not directly govern access to specific BigQuery resources. Therefore, authorized IP address restrictions align directly with ensuring that only requests from designated IPs are processed, making it the most suitable choice for preventing unauthorized queries to BigQuery tables.