Identity in a Zero Trust World

Identity at the center of security. ZeroTrust has been the growing buzzword and theme for the last couple of years in security. At its core, it means that we have to build our solutions to always question who someone is, what they want to do. We can no longer blindly trust that just because they come from a known location those questions no longer matter. At the center of those questions is on a critical concept: identity. Our solutions must continually validate the identity of the person accessing our applications and data. That includes authentication, authorization, and one that might not entirely be as obvious is administration. The identity becomes the Golden Key to ensuring that we can validate users. We need trusted sources that tell us who someone is and what access they should have. From there we can form the foundation of our policies that determine how things are accessed.

While it all sounds great in theory, what does that mean in reality? What steps do you take to get there? What does that mean for my firewall?
Let’s answer all of those questions.

First, let’s breakdown what it means to have a ZeroTrust model. The first significant point to understand is that there is no such thing as an internal network. Whether someone is accessing from Starbucks, Bangladesh, or their office desk nothing changes as far as trust goes. So there are no If/then rules for how strong the authentication is, based whether the user is internal or external. As far as the app is concerned all users are external. So we implement MFA across the board, every user, every time, everywhere. We get smarter about authentication and ask a lot more questions of the user by including behavior patterns, and a more in-depth look at the user’s attributes. Does the user know the password and are they logging in from a device we’ve seen before with an IP address we’ve seen before and from a location we expect? That’s a very different set of questions from “Does the user the password, and some random number?”

The second concept is that we question everything. We’ve verified who you are; now we need to verify what you are doing, or asking to do. Are you trying to access payroll data during business hours from an IP address we see often? Including more context into our authorization decisions allows us to make access decisions based off of what’s happening right now instead of some static rule we set 6 months ago. So we need the ability to build dynamic authorization policies that include information about the user and about what the user is trying to do. We need to include behavior patterns to understand what activity is considered normal and which are abnormal. ZeroTrust means we have to be smarter and more in-depth in the actions we take to verify a user.

Everything we’ve talked about all centers around identity. Having a robust identity infrastructure gives you the ability to build more dynamic and identity-aware applications, which brings me to the point of administration and governance. This is the very first brick that must be laid to build a robust solution; it provides you a foundation in which everything else will be built. To provide attributes needed for deeper authentication and authorization policies a trusted source is required from which to pull those attributes. The process of feeding that source and ensuring that the attributes are accurate is where governance and administration come into play. This allows you to control the lifecycle of new accounts and attributes and ensure they are aligned both from a quality perspective and policy perspective.

These concepts combine to give you a type of “ZeroTrust” architecture. However, I want to take the time to make a crucial point about Zero Trust. It’s not a solution, it’s a way of thinking, or maybe better said an approach. The entire concept is to challenge you to think differently about how you build your applications, networks, and security controls. You begin with the statement that you don’t trust any user. You don’t depend on a single attribute to determine your level of trust; instead, you continually build that trust with the user by asking questions. Who are you, where are you coming from, what are you trying to do, when are you trying to do it, etc., etc.? The common component for all of these questions is that you are trying to establish the person’s identity so the more you establish their identity, the more you trust them, the more you trust them, the more access you give them. Identity remains central to good security posture, and in this ZeroTrust world that doesn’t change, in fact, it enhances the need for it.