GCP Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Question

Your organization is deploying Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS) to provision users and groups from its on-premises Active Directory but wants every sign-in to Google Workspace and the Cloud Console to occur against the existing Okta tenant. During a design review, you are asked to clarify what role SAML 2.0 plays in this solution. Which statement correctly describes how SAML enables single sign-on in this architecture?

SAML is used only to encrypt passwords before GCDS pushes them to Google; the actual authentication step still occurs in Google Cloud using the replicated password hash.
SAML allows Google Cloud to act as the service provider, redirecting users to Okta (the identity provider) for authentication and trusting the returned SAML assertion that conveys the user's identity and attributes without exposing their password to Google.
SAML makes Google Cloud the primary identity provider, so user passwords must be stored in Google and synchronized back to Okta after each successful login.
SAML creates a bidirectional directory synchronization between Okta and Google, eliminating the need for Google Cloud Directory Sync and handling both provisioning and authentication.

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Answer Description

In Google's standard SAML implementation, Google Cloud and Google Workspace operate as the SAML service provider (SP). When a user attempts to access a Google application, Google immediately redirects the browser to the configured external identity provider (Okta) for primary authentication. Okta (the IdP) validates the user's credentials and, if successful, returns a signed SAML assertion to Google that contains the user's identity-and optionally group or role attributes-so Google can establish a session. No passwords or password hashes are stored or replicated in Google, and GCDS remains strictly a directory-provisioning tool rather than an authentication mechanism. The other options are wrong because Google never acts as the IdP in this flow, SAML does not replicate passwords, and it does not replace the need for GCDS when you still require account and group objects to exist in Google's directory.

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