As the security perimeter becomes increasingly shaped by cloud applications and remote working, organizations need to shift their controls. They also need to bolster their visibility into who and where data accessed, at what times and from which devices. Zero Trust Security addresses these concerns by establishing the principle that no user or device trusted to access any network resource until their identity and authorization verified. It’s a robust approach to thwarting possible cyber attacks.
Micro-segmentation
Micro-segmentation is the foundation of Zero Trust Security, dividing your enterprise network into a series of secure zones that can protected with policies and controls. This enables you to isolate networks, control access to specific resources, and verify identities without affecting network performance or impacting business operations.
To create effective micro-segments, you need to map existing traffic flows and interdependencies. This map will help you identify the data assets that need to protected and how they’re connected. Once you’ve done that, you can create micro-segments around each asset.
This approach to data protection allows you to reduce your attack surface, strengthen breach containment, and improve regulatory compliance. You also get visibility into your entire network environment, which helps you monitor and detect threats as they arise.
A good micro-segmentation solution will be able to provide a single policy that can apply to multiple applications and workloads across the enterprise. It’s also able to define fine-grained security policies at the host level, which makes it possible to implement zero trust on a distributed network.
For example, a zero-trust security solution can block all connections to an application that cannot verified by a set of predefined policies. This prevents lateral movement and ensures that only authorized users can access the application.
In addition, a good micro-segmentation solution should also offer visibility into all network traffic and data, which is critical for detecting breaches in real time. It should also provide granular security and dynamic adaptability so you can adjust to changing workloads and application environments.
According to a recent Forrester report, organizations that have strong data classification and visibility capabilities have higher success rates with their micro-segmentation projects. These companies take the time to define the data they want to micro-segment and map it before implementing it.
They also make sure that the traffic they map coupled with workload context. This ensures that they can detect breaches more easily and revert unauthorized changes to the data.
The best micro-segmentation solutions allow you to enforce the principle of least privilege, allowing users and devices to only have access to the resources they need to do their work. This helps you prevent lateral movement, which is a common occurrence in the event of a security incident.
Mutual Authentication
Mutual authentication is a key component of zero-trust security. It’s a bidirectional verification process that divides sent and received data into multiple channels, making it more difficult for threat actors to intercept or modify sensitive information.
A key advantage of mutual authentication is that it prevents credential theft, which can be a common attack method in phishing attacks. In a password-based authentication model, an attacker can steal a legitimate user’s password and use it to access sensitive accounts, potentially jeopardizing the user’s security.
In a mutual authentication model, both parties exchange certificates to verify each other’s identity and establish a trustable connection. This typically accomplished through Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, which can implement using digital certificates and public-key certificates.
This is especially important in secure service networking, where it’s critical to establish a trusted path for communication. It’s also essential for preventing “man in the middle” takeovers of communications and other network vulnerabilities.
For example, secure Web services are essential for securing business-to-business (B2B) applications that send and receive data across the Internet. For these types of transactions, mutual authentication provides the strongest means of ensuring that both sides of a transaction are trustworthy.
You can enable mutual authentication for Apps@Work on iOS and Android if you select Certificate Authentication for Apps@Work at Apps > Apps@Work Settings. For Mobile@Work on macOS, mutual authentication is a default. If you enable it, you must create a SCEP certificate enrollment setting with the Decentralized option before devices register and check-in.
After you have enabled mutual authentication, any devices that register will use mutual authentication in communication with Core on port 443. When a device is checked-in with Core for the first time, Core sends a mutual authentication client identity certificate to the device. Then, the device uses this client identity certificate in communication with Core all subsequent times it checks-in.
You can set a renewal window for mutual authentication to allow devices to renew their identity certificates. The renewal window starts 30 days before the certificate’s expiration date and ends on that date. If the renewal window exceeded, a device will not be able to check-in until it has reregistered with Core.
End-to-End Encryption
End-to-end encryption is a security technology that protects communications between two parties by encrypting data so that only the intended recipients can read it. It also prevents unauthorized third parties from reading messages. It is similar to zero-knowledge encryption, which protects cloud storage, but E2EE extends to networking and can be use to ensure compliance with data privacy laws.
While end-to-end encryption is a great way to protect your privacy, it can pose problems for law enforcement agencies. For example, if a government agency requests a private conversation from Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, Apple is not able to decrypt the message on the fly, requiring a long-drawn court case to gain access. This is a serious limitation for law enforcement and intelligence officers conducting investigations.
Additionally, although the encryption itself is private, there are vulnerabilities to a user’s device that could allow an attacker to access their messages without detected. Malware on a smartphone, for example, can read your correspondence before they’re encrypted or after decryption, allowing the attacker to impersonate you or even steal your identity.
This is why it is so important to safeguard your devices and applications with end-to-end encryption. You should never trust your devices to anyone or let them use them without a password or PIN code.
Likewise, you should always be sure that your devices protected with antivirus software. If your phone is lost or stolen, malware on it can still read your correspondence.
Zero Trust Security is a framework of strategies, technologies, and policies to minimize the blast radius of a security breach and reduce lateral movement. It includes micro-segmentation, mutual authentication, and end-to-end encryption among others.
To be effective, Zero Trust must implemented in a consistent manner to ensure full benefits achieved over time. Follow-through and adherence to the mindset is necessary, along with the application of Zero Trust in diverse environments.
Unlike legacy security models, which rely on network perimeters and centralized policy settings, Zero Trust Security is a flexible approach that allows you to implement strategies that will ensure the protection of your business’s sensitive data across a wide array of resources – from on-premises and cloud infrastructure to embedded IoT devices. It leverages a variety of capabilities and technologies from Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to identity and access management (IAM), encryption, scoring, file system permissions and more. It is design to simplify your security operations, from securing the network to ensuring compliance and reducing the burden on your security operations center (SOC).
Security Orchestration
Security orchestration enables organizations to connect security tools and systems, automate security tasks, and streamline the entire lifecycle of their security operations. The goal is to reduce human effort by allowing security operations teams to automate the execution of remediation, monitoring and threat detection tasks to free up their time for more strategic work.
A Zero Trust solution must offer comprehensive security orchestration capabilities for a unified network architecture that includes cloud, on-premises and edge devices. It also must support DevSecOps practices to enforce policy consistency and compliance across all systems in the business.
The security orchestration layer should integrate with existing technologies to automate processes, such as integrating a firewall, an antivirus software system, and a data protection platform into one seamless workflow. It should also provide a variety of workflows that are pre-built and ready to use.
In addition, a good zero trust security orchestration, automation and response solution should allow your team to adapt workflows to the needs of your organization or build entirely new workflows that fit with your Zero Trust goals. This way, you can get the most out of your security orchestration solutions and achieve your desired security goals quickly.
Another consideration is scalability. As your organization grows or changes, you’ll need to increase the number of workflows you’re able to automate. Fortunately, a well-designed and supported SOAR solution can help your team scale up workflows rapidly to accommodate this growth.
For example, a cloud security orchestration solution should be able to support multiple user lifecycle management use cases and enable teams to rapidly add new users to your network while simultaneously enforcing Zero Trust policies. This will help you minimize MTTD and MTTR metrics to keep your Zero Trust environment running smoothly.
Lastly, your security orchestration and automation solutions should be compatible with other technologies that you use, such as identity access management and application security. This allows your team to seamlessly adapt and implement Zero Trust policies within the broader IT environment, saving you valuable time and resources. It also helps you achieve the security goals that you set for your team.
Recommended readings:
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- 5 Ways That Security Is Defined
- What is Zero Trust Security in IT?
