What is Zero Trust Security?


Technological advancements have widened the meaning of "office," allowing companies to communicate via mobile devices and other software, regardless of where their employees are. These changes, however, create a cybersecurity problem. The perimeter of security is no longer limited to the confines of an office building. Business data is constantly transferred between SaaS apps, IaaS, data centers, distant users, IoT devices, and other systems. As a result, cybercriminals now have access to more attack surfaces and entry points than ever before.

What is Zero Trust?

Zero Trust (ZT) is a set of guidelines for allowing specific features that help protect enterprises in today's cloud and mobile world.

  • "Least-privileged access" is a basic notion of Zero Trust, which assumes that no user or application should be automatically trusted.

  • Instead, Trust is formed based on the user's identity and context (such as the user's location, the endpoint's security posture, and the app or service being requested), with policy acting as a gatekeeper throughout.

  • The Zero Trust paradigm has been developed for distributed computing and an ever-increasing attack surface. Unlike a single sign-on (SSO) technique, which will enable users to log in once and access various network services without re-entering their authentication credentials, Zero Trust requires authentication credentials to be confirmed and re-checked, each time a network resource is requested.

Because untrustworthy threat actors can be found both inside and outside a network, Zero Trust advocates for the following principles −

  • Never trust
  • Always verify
  • Enforce the principle of least privilege.

One of the main goals of the Zero Trust Model is to prevent malicious actors from moving laterally across a target network using a compromised account.

How Does Zero Security Work?

Previously, cybersecurity efforts were concentrated on safeguarding the network perimeter. With the rise of distributed cloud and edge computing, network aspects that weren't previously included in access control decisions have become critical - and must be safeguarded like any other attack surface.

Information Received in Real-Time

Zero Trust uses information received in real-time from many sources to safeguard essential data and resources inside and outside the traditional network perimeter. This necessitates collaboration between DevOps teams and security experts to create a unified set of security processes that analyze and log all forms of network traffic.

Limiting Access to Network Resources

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) employs the principle of least privilege (POLP) to limit access to network resources. ZT Identity and Access Management (IAM) processes use a combination of contextual information, such as username, password, device type, IP address, and physical location to assess whether an access request should be granted or refused.

Microsegmentation

Microsegmentation is vital in Zero Trust because it logically divides an extensive network into smaller, easier-to-manage portions. Network security engineers can identify and contain breaches far faster and more efficiently by dividing the network into microsegments than traditional, monolithic cybersecurity systems primarily meant to secure the network perimeter.

Robust Cybersecurity

A robust cybersecurity infrastructure is required for a Zero Trust architecture to make, log, and enforce access choices for diverse (but linked) cybersecurity capabilities. Network and engineering teams will use software-defined networking (SDN) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to search for data patterns that suggest malicious activity in real-time.

To ensure access control enforcement remains as granular as feasible, security experts will need to know how to deal with artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) programming that will grant or deny access permissions.

Advantages of Zero Trust Model

Following are the advantages of using Zero Trust Model −

  • The fundamental benefit of adopting a Zero Trust strategy is that it safeguards you from all sides, particularly from within. Traditional security solutions, such as defense-in-depth, have generally focused on protecting the network perimeter.

  • Many of today's breaches are caused by employees or threats that have infiltrated the network through email, browsers, VPN connections, and other means.

  • Data exfiltration can be straightforward for someone who already has network access. Zero Trust addresses this by denying access to everyone and everything until the network can authenticate your identity. It then maintains track of how you use data and, if required, revokes your permission to share it with others.

  • Zero Trust is a challenging concept to implement. Everyone in an organization must understand and commit to the necessity for verification and re-verification requests to move to a Zero Trust security paradigm.

  • When a user credential, hardware device, or network service is hacked, a successful Zero Trust plan will assist ensure harm can be rapidly confined and remediated. On the other hand, Zero Trust can cause delay and a bad user experience when implemented incorrectly on the back end.

Updated on: 18-Apr-2022

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