The Core Principles of Zero Trust Security Model

The zero trust security model uses strict principles that keeps your data, network, and even users secure. These principles are majorly created on the formula, ‘Never Trust, Always Verify’, where all the users and access requests are treated as threats and fairly authenticated.

Let’s understand in detail what are the prominent Zero Trust Security principles, along with the model’s implementation and the challenges faced in the process.

What is Zero Trust?

Zero Trust is a security framework that by default assumes that no application or user is trustworthy. It follows a zero-trust principle at each step, for every user. Under the Zero Trust architecture, all users and applications are treated the same, irrespective of whether they are operating from inside or outside the enterprise premises.

Access requests by every user and device are continuously authenticated and validated on a case-by-case basis, that too on multiple steps, using multi-factor authentication. This implies that just entering a one-time password to gain access will not be enough to enter the enterprise network.

This security architecture further secures your network, data, and other corporate resources from unauthorized access, while minimizing the cybersecurity-associated risks.

4 Core Zero Trust Security Principles

The Zero Trust Security Model is a strategy build upon a cybersecurity ecosystem that functions on user identity, secure access, and user segmentation. Moreover, the security model adheres to the below mentioned principles:

• Continuous Verification

This principle states continuous verification and zero trust on any network, workload, people, devices, credentials, or more. This principle works on the basic Zero Trust formula which says, ‘Never Trust, Always Verify’.

In this zero trust security principle, all the assets must be continuously verified and authenticated rather than just once in the beginning. Moreover, the authentication should be done on all available data points that include location, user identity, data classification, device health, anomalies, and more. However, these data points move often, so your Zero Trust deployment must be fast and scalable.

• Limit Access and Privileges

Businesses can limit user access and privileges with functionalities like JEA (Just Enough Access) and JIT (Just in Time). Further, carefully managed user permissions enable businesses to secure user productivity and data.

It ensures user access is limited to crucial, need-to-know information. This protects other sensitive data from being overexposed.

• Monitor and Analyze Activity

This Zero Trust Security Principle helps in making informed decisions related to access. However, these decisions require IT teams to gain deeper visibility into the activities carried on corporate networks and devices.

The Zero Trust model helps businesses in taking analytical decisions that are based on continuous monitoring, logging, correlation, and analysis of the data collected from the entire IT ecosystem.

• Assume Breach

No security model is perfect or can eliminate breaches completely. However, it increases the security of your data and reduces the impact of a breach, if any. Another Zero Trust Principle is also focused on minimizing the segment access and blast radius.

Limiting impact involves segmenting access by user identity and implementing granular controls. User segmentation here means ensuring that users only access those resources or data that they are permitted to.

Whereas granular access controls ensure that users at least have the basic access to the network so that they can perform their tasks without any obstacles.

How to Implement Zero Trust Security?

Every enterprise has its unique needs, and that’s the reason why starting with Zero Trust Security might seem a little complicated. However, starting small, and then scaling as your users, network, and organization adapt to the security model.

To further understand the Zero Trust Security implementation, we divided the process into three simple stages – Visualize, Mitigate, and Optimize. Let’s understand in detail what happens in each stage.

Stage 1 – Visualize: The first stage involves businesses understanding all its resources and their access points. This will enable them to visualize the risks involved.

Stage 2 – Mitigate: Stage two is focused on detecting and stopping threats. However, if the threat cannot be immediately controlled or stopped, the security model should be able to mitigate its impact.

Stage 3 – Optimize: The final step of the implementation includes extending protection to all the aspects of a business’ IT infrastructure. This must be done for all inside and outside end-users, security, and IT teams.

Challenges in Implementing Zero Trust Security

Implementing Zero Trust requires effort, time, and foresight for a business. It is not a one-time model, that you can implement and forget, rather you will have to give continuous trials.

Let’s understand some of the common challenges that you might have to deal with during Zero Trust Security implementation.

• Complexity and Required IT Resources

The enterprise structure is complex and changes continuously. Introducing and implementing a new security model will take up an enterprise’s valuable IT resources and require them to delicately work on understanding the architectural complexity of the security model.

• Access for Multiple Applications

In traditional access systems, users only use one credential to access the network. It is easier to manage but often gets compromised. While implementing the Zero Trust Security Model, enterprises need to reconsider their existing access model. Then make their employees and external users adapt to a new one.

It will be altogether a very different user experience, as users will have to now go through a continuous authentication and verification process.

• More Companies Switching to Cloud-Based Services

As an increasing number of companies are moving towards offering cloud-based services, the data loss risk is becoming more prevalent. This happens because cloud-based business environments are distributed, as a result of which they can be theoretically accessed anywhere, by anyone.

Conclusion

Implementing the Zero Trust Security Model might seem a little complex as you will need to make some major changes in your security architecture. But, when seen in a bigger picture, it is important to secure your network from unauthorized access and breaches.

Moreover, the Zero Trust Security principles like continuous verification, limited access & privileges, assumed breach, and more make it one of the best choices for a complex enterprise security architecture.