The 4 Zero Trust Principles to Implement
The zero-trust security model is built around a few core principles, which include:
- Principle of Least Privilege: The principle of least privilege (POLP) states that remote users and devices should only have the access and privileges needed to perform their role. By eliminating over-privileged accounts, an organization reduces the potential threat posed by abuse of these privileges by an attacker.
- Continuous Verification: The zero trust model states that every access request should be independently and explicitly verified. Checking a user identity or device’s permissions before granting access reduces the risk that an attacker who compromises a device can use an existing session.
- Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA): ZTNA is a remote access solution that implements zero trust principles. ZTNA explicitly verifies access to particular resources, rather than granting access to the corporate network as a whole.
- Micro-Segmentation: Micro-segmentation breaks a private network into individual segments at the application or workload level. This helps to detect and contain a security incident if a segment is compromised by an attacker.
How Do Zero Trust Policies Work?
By defining policies around least privilege access, continuous verification, ZTNA, and micro-segmentation, an organization implements the core building blocks of a zero trust deployment. Combining these policies – and potentially adding others such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) – creates a robust zero trust program.
Many of these zero trust policies are geared toward improving an organization’s security visibility and rapidly identifying suspicious activity. If a compromised account tries to take actions that it lacks the privileges for or attempts to cross segment boundaries without authorization, the organization can take action to lock down the account or block suspicious traffic.
By doing so, it minimizes the potential costs and impacts of the attack on the organization.
How to Implement a Zero Trust Strategy
Some best practices that organizations can follow to make a transition into zero trust include the following:
- Assess Your Current Security Strategy: Performing an audit of existing policies and strategies is essential to identify potential security gaps and determine what needs to be implemented to achieve zero trust.
- Identify Trust Boundaries and Segmentation: To implement this, the organization should identify where these boundaries should be and implement network segmentation to create and enforce them.
- Define Access Policies and Controls: Zero trust security requires least-privilege access controls, which only grant users and devices the access required by their role. Defining access policies and controls requires defining these roles and identifying the privileges that they require.
- Deploy Zero Trust Solutions: Zero trust policies require security solutions capable of supporting them. For example, remote access VPN, SASE, or Firewall-as-as-Service solutions should be implemented with fine-grain zero-trust policies that invoke least privilege access for remote workers, including limiting user access to specific areas or applications.
Challenges and Considerations of Zero Trust Policies
When implementing zero trust policies, some of the common hurdles that organizations experience include the following:
- Balancing Security and UX: Zero trust requires explicit verification of each access request against least-privilege access controls. However, this can also introduce network latency or block legitimate traffic. Managing this risk requires scalable enforcement solutions and access controls that are carefully designed, and regularly reviewed and updated.
- Integration with Legacy Systems: Some IT and security solutions may lack the ability to implement the granular access controls required by zero trust. This challenge can be overcome using application-aware next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) and other security solutions.
- Adapting to Evolving Cyber Threats: Identifying suspicious and malicious activity can be more difficult as external threats evolve to become more subtle or to exploit new vulnerabilities. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help with the detection and remediation of zero-day threats.
- Managing Multi-Cloud Environments: An effective zero trust deployment requires consistent identity management and access control, which can be difficult to implement in multi-cloud environments. Identity federation or network-level enforcement of zero trust – using a solution like secure access service edge (SASE) – can help to ensure consistent zero trust security across cloud environments.
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