Zero Trust: Moving Beyond Perimeter Security

Roughly five years ago, John Kindervag, security thought leader and former Forrester analyst, proposed a solution that he termed “Zero Trust.” The principle behind it is quite simple, but very powerful: Trust is not an attribute of location. You shouldn’t trust something simply because it is behind your firewall. Instead, you should take a very pessimistic view on security where every machine, user, and server should be untrusted until proven otherwise. The method of proof for this is strong authentication and authorization, and no data transfer should occur until trust has been established.