Fall Cyber Solutions Fest 2026: Identity Security and Zero Trust Track

The SANS Fall Cyber Solutions Fest 2026: Identity Security and Zero Trust Track delivers a deep technical examination of identity as the modern attack surface. As adversaries exploit misconfigured IdPs, weak federation trust, poisoned authentication flows, and over-permissioned service principals, this track analyzes the mechanics of identity compromise across multiple attack surfaces, and hybrid environments. Sessions will dissect novel identity threat vectors, including token replay and manipulation, MFA fatigue attacks, conditional access bypass techniques, and identity infrastructure persistence. Practitioners will gain prescriptive guidance on securing authentication pipelines, hardening federation architectures, and monitoring high-risk identity events with advanced telemetry.

Anchored in Zero Trust architecture, the track focuses on continuous policy enforcement, adaptive authentication, micro-segmentation, and automated privilege reduction across distributed systems. Experts will present reference architectures and implementation patterns for identity-centric Zero Trust deployments, covering identity threat detection and response (ITDR), identity-driven segmentation, policy decision point/orchestration design, and integration of identity context into SIEM, XDR, and SOAR workflows. Attendees will leave with actionable techniques for securing machine identities, enforcing least privilege at scale, validating trust signals in real time, and operationalizing Zero Trust across multi-cloud and SaaS ecosystems.