Generate HMAC keys for a service account to use with Google Cloud Storage Interoperability API

Question

Some tools (for example fog library) need to use the Interoperability API to be able to manage objects in Google Cloud Storage buckets. That API uses HMAC authentication.

It's straightforward to generate the HMAC credentials for personal accounts. Here're steps From the documentation of fog:

get your credentials under the section “Interoperable Access”.

However I cannot figure out how to generate those for service accounts. That is necessary in my case because I'd like to grant access to a bucket to an application rather then a person.

Answer 1

There's no way to generate HMAC secrets for service accounts. The sub-optimal solution is to create a dedicated user account for signing. You can create signed URLs using service account RSA certificates, but that won't work for HMAC compatibility.