Zero Trust Security Model

Introduction

Zero Trust Model is a proactive cybersecurity strategy for protecting modern digital corporate environments, such as public and private clouds, SaaS apps, DevOps, Ticket Integration, BI integration and more. Zero Trust Model is based on the idea that businesses should not trust anything automatically, whether it's outside or inside their network perimeter. Anyone and everything attempting to connect to an organization's systems must first be authenticated before access is authorized, according to Zero Trust Model. Zero Trust Model's major goal is to reduce the danger of cybersecurity threats in the modern environments where most businesses operate.

Zero Trust Model was first introduced by John Kindervag an analyst at Forrester Research and although not entirely a new theory, it has become more and more important for modern day digital transformation and its impact on business network security architecture.

The Zero Trust Model follows the traditional "castle-and-moat " approach to cybersecurity, which focused on defending the perimeter and keeping attackers out while assuming that everyone and everything inside the perimeter was cleared for access and thus did not pose a threat to the organisation. This is largely discounted by the Zero Trust Model. This strategy depended significantly on firewalls and other security measures, but it was vulnerable to malicious people within businesses who got or were granted access to privileged accounts.





Why is

Zero Trust Security

Important?

A data breach occurs when a cybercriminal infiltrates a data source and extracts confidential information. This can be done by accessing a computer or network to steal local files or by bypassing network security remotely. By going with the latest Data Breach reports.

On January 22, 2020, a customer support database holding over 280 million Microsoft customer records was left unprotected on the web (IdentityForce). On July 20, 2020, an unsecured server exposed the sensitive data belonging to 60,000 customers of the family history search software company, Ancestry.com (IdentityForce).

On November 5, 2020, a database for Mashable.com containing 1,852,595 records of staff, users, and subscribers data was leaked by hackers (IdentityForce). And the list goes on. Almost every single day incidents are being reported that lead to massive financial and brand losses to enterprises worldwide.

The cost of the data breach over the global scale is estimated to cost $10.5 trillions annually by 2025. To prevent such massive data breaches it is predicted that global cybersecurity spending will exceed $1 trillion cumulatively from 2017 to 2021 (Cybersecurity Ventures).

In today's world, data is spread across an almost infinite number of services, devices, applications and people. With this spread, its almost impossible to know, who is accessing what and whether he/she is the authorized person accessing the device. With Zero Trust, no actor can be trusted until they're verified. It's a holistic, strategic approach to security that ensures that everyone and every device granted access is who and what they say they are.

Below are the drivers that make Zero Trust Security important.

In the Evolving Enterprise, Perimeter- Based Security Is Ineffective

The way Enterprises do business and use digital technologies is continuously changing and at an incredible speed. Traditional perimeter-based cybersecurity methods are becoming obsolete as a result of these digital revolutions, as perimeters no longer determine the scope of security protection

Only zero trust security authenticates and approves access requests at the micro-level at every point in a network Nobody has unrestricted access to the entire system, according to the principle of least privilege. Instead, to get access to various areas of the network, each request must be continuously monitored and authenticated.

If a breach occurs, micro-segmentation will impede every movement and limit the amount of harm that a malicious attacker can create.

Everyone in the Expanding Workforce Shouldn't Have All-Access

The way enterprises conduct their critical business and the people they rely on to perform key functions have changed Network users are no longer just employees and customers. Many users who access a business's applications and infrastructure could be vendors servicing a system, suppliers, or partners.

None of these non-employees need, or should have, access to all applications, infrastructure, or business data.

Even employees perform specialized functions and therefore do not need complete network access. A well- executed zero trust strategy allows authenticated access based on key dimensions of trust. This enables businesses to more precisely control access, even to those with elevated privileges.

APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) Are Getting More Advanced

In the early 2000s, fraudsters would execute cyberattacks solely to expose well-known websites’ security flaws. Cyberattacks, on the other hand, are huge business these days. The financial benefits of using ransomware or stealing intellectual property are substantial. Hackers, as well as the tools and strategies they utilize, are becoming increasingly advanced in order to maximise their profits. Data breaches today are more sophisticated than basic phishing frauds, though they still occur.

Cyberattacks nowadays could have national, social, physical, and economical ramifications. Cybercrime is becoming highly organised, with nation-states, international crime organisations, and ransomware organizations all participating. These bad guys are clever enough to get beyond typical perimeter security. They use APTs and move around quietly until they achieve their goal of stealing information or disrupting systems that do not use micro-segmentation or a zero-trust approach.

Benefits of Zero Trust Security

Some of the key benefits of Zero Trust Security are:

  • Protect against both internal and external threats

  • Reduce the threat surface of the attack

  • Reduce an attacker’s ability to move laterally within the organization

  • Provide role based access with time restricted access to systems with the principle of least privileges

  • Bring in transparency into all accesses for on premise & cloud systems

  • Improve the visibility and control on all user accesses to systems

  • Improve the overall governance, risk and compliance of the organization



Security

Components of

Zero Trust Security

The key security elements that lead to Zero Trust Security are:


MFA (Multi -Factor Authentication) The MFA feature works as an additional layer of user authentication on the front end. MFA helps verify that the individual accessing the systems in terms of who they say they are in the event of stolen credentials.


Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is an approach to restrict system access to authorized users only. Role-based access control (RBAC) is a policy-neutral secure access-control mechanism defined around roles and privileges. The components of RBAC such as role-permissions, user-role and role-role relationships make it simple to perform user assignments.


Time Based Access Control (TBAC) The concept of least privileges can be applied using Time Based Access or Just in Time access. This allows users to access systems only for a specific window of time that is required to do the activity on the system. This feature is one of the key components of Zero Trust Security.


Single Sign On (SSO) Single Sign On is the concept where the user authenticates on a system with AD user and Password and then gets seamless access to other systems without the password. SSO ensures that no system password is required to access it once the user is authenticated with a combination of user name, password along with Multi Factor Authentication.


Password Vaulting All the passwords of the systems are secured in a password vault or a secret safe which provisions passwords on demand to provide seamless single sign on to systems. No passwords are available with the users and all passwords are stored in an encrypted form in the password vault. Password Vault forms a critical component of Zero Trust Security.


Traceability Logs of all user accesses and activities are stored securely. These logs are non editable and non deletable even by the super admins. These logs are transparently available to system auditors for forensics and compliance to regulatory requirements. This traceability piece is the most critical aspect and extremely challenging element of Zero Trust Security.

Organizations worldwide are facing severe challenges around protecting their enterprise privileged accounts in order to secure their enterprises from getting compromised, breached or attacked from internal or external threats.

PAM offers a strong enterprise identity and access governance solution to protect enterprises from such insider and outsider threats.

While PAM solution offers all the key components of Zero Trust Security from MFA, RBAC, TBAC, SSO, Password Vaulting to Full traceability of every privileged access and activity done by users, the challenge is around how to protect the logs and sessions recordings in PAM.

If the PAM super admin can delete the logs and or session recordings the Zero Trust Security fails.

Iraje PAM offers a solution to ensure Complete Zero Trust Security in PAM solution where even the super admin of PAM solution cannot edit, delete or tamper the logs and session recordings of all privileged accesses and activities of users.

Iraje PAM is the only real Zero Trust Security solution capable of protecting the logs and session recordings even from the PAM super admins.

With secure val codes required to even to execute commands or do maintenance activities on the PAM operating system, Iraje PAM takes Zero Trust Security to the next level. A combination of critical components of Zero Trust Security along with security around traceability of every access and activity of privileged users makes Iraje PAM the most comprehensive PAM solution with Real Zero Trust Security.