What is Zero Trust Security?

• Zero Trust Definition

  Zero Trust Definition

  Zero Trust, a strategic, architectural approach to network security, is based on the notion that every user, device, or system trying to access a network is a potential threat, whether inside or outside the organization's security perimeter. Devised by Forrester's John Kindervag, this modern security concept works on the principle of "never trust, always verify." It requires organizations not to trust anyone and instead authenticate and authorize every access request to their applications and data.
• How does Zero Trust work?

  How does Zero Trust work?

  Zero Trust model thinks beyond the traditional perimeter-based network security approach. Traditionally, every user and device inside the organization network is considered reliable, and everyone outside is deemed unreliable. This approach cannot stop the lateral movement of an attacker after he accesses the company’s network. Moreover, it also discounts the fact that distributed workloads spread across on-premises and cloud increases the challenges to set up single security control for the entire network.

  Zero Trust model resolves the challenges of the traditional security approach with security techniques, such as strict identity verification, micro-segmentation, and least privilege access. This added layer of security helps organizations securely embrace hybrid infrastructure and achieve compliance with various information security standards, such as HIPAA, FISMA, and PCI DSS. Zero Trust prioritizes data security such as payment card information (PCI), intellectual property (IP), or protected health information (PHI) is protected.
• Zero Trust Architecture

  Zero Trust Architecture

  Besides data, the Zero Trust architecture secures networks, workloads, and devices through various control measures. Below are the key focus areas of the Zero Trust model:

  Zero Trust Data: Safety of data becomes quintessential for any Zero Trust framework. The primary objective of this model is to ensure blocking attackers through strict security controls. It continuously monitors data accessed by different users, applications, or devices across different network zones to respond to potential threats.

  Zero Trust Devices: The growth in Internet of Things (IoT) has increased the number of network devices. Each device in your network can be an infiltration point of a potential cyberattack. In a Zero Trust environment, your IT team should control and secure physical and virtual devices to prevent possible attacks.

  Zero Trust Workloads: A "workload" is a term used to refer to the back-end software or application services running over the cloud. Customer-facing applications vulnerable to attacks need maximum protection. You should focus on the entire application stack including backend, database, and front end while strengthening your security posture through Zero Trust.

  Zero Trust Network: The traditional IT network security practices based on the castle-and-coat concept allows attackers to navigate the internal systems or applications with minimum resistance after they infiltrate your corporate firewalls. As everyone within the network is trusted, data breach becomes easy. However, the Zero trust model controls user access by segmenting and isolating your network using technologies such as next-gen firewalls.
• Zero Trust Principles

  Zero Trust Principles

  Outlined below are some of the principles you should follow to build a secure network:

  Authenticate and authorize access to all network resources

  Zero Trust model assumes threats are both inside and outside of the network, so every user or machine should be authenticated and authorized before granting access. Without implicit trust, entire network traffic is evaluated in an unbiased way and verified strictly to validate every user activity, regardless of their location, device, or identity.
  Incorporate modern tools and technologies to safeguard your network

  Zero Trust architecture leverages modern security techniques, such as least privilege access, micro-segmentation, and multi-factor authentication. With the least privilege access, users receive access or privileges necessary to execute their daily tasks. It protects valuable data and limits the lateral movement of attackers during a breach. Besides users, it also ensures limiting access to devices, applications, and systems.

  Micro-segmentation is a crucial part of Zero Trust network. It focuses on breaking up the overall barrier or security perimeter to segments or zones and providing separate access to each segment of the network; thereby ensuring robust prevention.

  Zero Trust security also focuses on multi-factor authentication (MFA) to verify the user's identity. It uses two or more mechanisms to authenticate users when they log in to any system, such as email/text verification, security questions, and device prompts. With multiple authentication factors in place, you can bolster your overall network security.

  Employ real-time monitoring and alerting tools

  Besides enforcing preventative security control, Zero Trust architecture also supports real-time network security monitoring tools. Monitoring distributed security architecture with a Zero Trust model can be challenging for your security teams. However, these tools ensure your existing security policies are implemented correctly and alert security teams in case of vulnerabilities. Further, you can identify the root causes of threats in your network and eliminate them quickly.
• Benefits of a Zero Trust security model

  Benefits of a Zero Trust security model

  Improves visibility into enterprise traffic

  The Zero Trust model asserts that location shouldn’t be the primary metric to establish trust. A cyber intrusion can emerge from both inside and outside of your network. Therefore, the Zero Trust strategy focuses on identifying and classifying all the users and devices in your network. This helps you to gather insights about users, devices, and applications accessing your network.

  Safeguard customer information

  A breach of data leads to financial loss along with damaging the reputation of a business. A Zero Trust strategy combined with just-in-time access provisioning can prevent attackers or malware from accessing a large segment of your dataset and network. You can minimize the damage by limiting the infiltration area and time during a malware attack using Zero Trust micro-segmentation. If the malware can trespass your firewall, it can extract a large amount of your valuable customer data and other confidential information.
  Support compliance initiatives

  A Zero Trust network can provide auditors with better visibility around the security measures within your organization. With micro-segmentation and fine-grained access control, you can effectively safeguard regulated and sensitive data such as credit card details and stay compliant with various data security regulations. Moreover, a Zero Trust network logs the critical information of every access request, such as time of access request, location, and applications involved in that request. This minimizes the time required to produce detailed information of all access attempts during a compliance audit.
  Increases your security staff productivity

  Cloud-based Zero Trust security solutions enable the network security team to work more efficiently. It offers centralized monitoring capabilities, allowing IT staff to secure all their network applications, devices, and users from a single interface. Further, they can leverage predictive analytics to identify upcoming potential threats in the network. Moreover, with a single-sign-on and multi-factor authentication, IT staff can be more time-efficient as they have to spend a lot less time on help desk tickets related to password reset and locked devices. Likewise, security teams are able to identify and eliminate threats early on due to complete network visibility. Ultimately, with a Zero Trust model, it’s easy to improve the productivity of the entire IT staff.

  Strengthens cloud security

  Organizations embracing digital transformation are rapidly moving their applications and infrastructure into the cloud. However, traditional network security solutions aren’t designed for the cloud and therefore, they are not dependable. With cloud-based Zero Trust security solutions, you can maintain adequate security for applications running in the cloud and on-premises data centers. Such solutions can offer centralized control and SSO capabilities, allowing end users to access cloud applications seamlessly with minimum security threats.
• How do you implement a Zero Trust model?

  How do you implement a Zero Trust model?

  1. Identity sensitive data and define the protect surface

  An attack surface is the playground for attackers. It outlines the total number of vulnerabilities in your hardware and software. While safeguarding the entire network is daunting, you can focus on identifying the data, applications, assets, and services (DAAS) most sensitive and critical for business continuity. DAAS is the most vulnerable playground in any organization.

  For example, employees working remotely from home are more likely to succumb to a cyberattack due to compromised networks. These users can be clubbed and put together in separate network zones for higher security.

  2. Understand the flow of critical data in your business

  The next step of implementing the Zero Trust model is identifying the flow of sensitive data in your business. Data inside your organization is continuously accessed by multiple users from different devices. Therefore, it is critical to understand the usage of such data. You can map the traffic flow to understand the interdependencies between your data, application, asset, and service. To make it better, you can leverage automated tools to obtain a clear distinction between valid and invalid flows and subsequently place controls around different network segments or zones to prevent unauthorized traffic.

  3. Architecture your network with Zero Trust security micro-perimeters

  Micro-perimeters take security controls closer to every service or application in your network to prevent the lateral movement of attackers during a breach. Micro-perimeters are built around your protect surface using segmentation gateways, such as next-gen firewalls, to refrain attackers from reaching the most sensitive parts of your network. Software-defined networking (SDN) platform eases segmenting networks and applications by applying proper filters or micro-perimeters and security policies, ensuring effective implementation of the Zero Trust strategy.

  4. Devise access policies

  After setting up your network, create Zero Trust security policies for accessing different parts of your network. You should devise these policies based on the "Kipling Method," which solves a particular problem with the "5W1H" approach. By using this method, you can create access policies at a granular level. It ensures only authorized traffic or users enter your network. While creating the security policy, addresses the following aspects:

  • Who will be accessing data, applications, or services in the network?
  • What particular application is employed to access protect surface-secured data or applications?
  • When is the resource accessed?
  • Where is the packet destination?
  • Why is the packet aiming to access a resource inside the protect surface?
  • How is the packet accessing the protect surface?

  5. Monitor, maintain, and automate

  After creating micro-segments and enforcing security policies, monitor your network infrastructure regularly. Audit device configurations and network traffic consistently to detect unusual activity and ensure compliance with security regulations. Monitoring also enables you to learn more about all the traffic flows and discard the abnormal peaks through effective security policies. You can also automate and orchestrate the entire network. With automation, you can cut down manual efforts and manage change requests efficiently. With the right monitoring, you can easily build a secure, reliable, and compliant network.