Zero Trust – a Trendy Buzzword or a Future of Cybersecurity?
Zero Trust security is the hot trend and a buzzword in the cybersecurity world right now. But what is behind the buzz? In general, it is a cybersecurity concept that is based on a principal of eliminating implicit trust to assets or users and verifying all access. Current cyber threat landscape and trends make this concept very appealing for organizations. However, how exactly does Zero Trust work? Is it the new way to pro-actively secure your organization, or is it a costly investment with a potential to overwhelm already complex enterprise network operations? In this article, we break down what Zero Trust actually is and the reality of its implementation into the highly-complex, hybrid enterprises in the work-from-anywhere era. Zero Trust term was first coined in 1994 by Stephen Paul Marsh, computer science professor at University of Sterling, and popularized by a Forrester Researcher John Kindevag in the early 2000s. They challenged the concept of trust relating to the cybersecurity and computer field. Zero Trust was presented as an approach that always assumes breach and continuously verifies each access, regardless of whether the request comes from the inside or outside the network, while asserting least privilege. Zero Trust Security assumes there is no traditional network edge and everything is hostile by default. No application, access request, user, employee, or link should be trusted. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines Zero Trust as a collection of concepts and ideas designed to minimize uncertainty in enforcing accurate, least privilege per-request access decisions in information systems and services in the face of a network viewed as compromised. An enterprise’s cybersecurity plan that utilizes zero trust concepts and encompasses component relationships, workflow planning, and access policies is defined as Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA). Therefore, a zero-trust enterprise is the network infrastructure (physical and virtual) and operational policies that are in place for an enterprise as a product of a zero trust architecture plan. A few years after the Zero Trust concept was first introduced, Google announced that they had implemented Zero Trust security in their network, which sparked a growing interest in adoption within the tech community. In 2019, Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, listed Zero Trust security access as a core component of secure access service edge (SASE) solutions. Since 2021 all US Federal agencies must adhere to NIST 800-207 Zero Trust policies. As a result, Zero Trust is being widely marketed and adopted by private enterprises. Frameworks are developed around the concept, incorporating AI and automation. While the philosophy of the Zero Trust concept – never trust, always verify – makes for a very attractive selling point promising uncompromisable cybersecurity defense, the implementation and adoption process is complex, continuous, and it is not a stand-alone, one-fits-all solution. It is not an AI powered band-aid, implementation of which can make an organization an impenetrable cyber-fortress. Rather, it is a strategic process that gradually raises an organization’s cybersecurity maturity level by implementing core security principals and transforming the security culture to meet the demands of evolving networks, cyber trends, and the change in work environments.What are the main principles of a Zero Trust Model?
NIST offers the following 7 guidelines for Zero Trust architecture design and deployment:
- Threat and Network Assessments - determining attack surface, identify assets, credentials and privilege distribution, assessing infrastructure, reviewing policies and protocols etc. Threat modeling can be a great tool for an organization to kick start the Zero Trust journey (more on it here).
- Establishing Zero Trust Security Measures, such as MFAs, least privilege principle, network and identity segmentation.
- Continuous Network Monitoring - employing automation and SOC tools (or virtual SOC) to analyze logs, requests, and activity in real-time without interruption.
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