What is Zero Trust Security in Cloud?
What is Cloud Security?
Cloud computing is the provision of hosted services over the Internet (including software, hardware and storage). The benefits of rapid deployment, flexibility, low initial costs and scalability have made cloud computing nearly universal among organizations of all sizes, often as part of a hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure / architecture.
Cloud security refers to technologies, policies, controls, and services that protect cloud data, applications and infrastructure from threats.
The Top 7 Advanced Cloud Security Challenges
Since the public cloud has no clear outline, it essentially presents a different security reality. This is even more difficult when applying modern cloud approaches such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD) methods, distributed serverless architecture and transient assets such as Services and Container functions.
Some of the advanced security challenges in the cloud and the multiple levels of risk facing cloud-oriented organizations today include:
Increased Attack Surface
The public cloud environment has become a large and attractive attack surface for hackers who exploit poorly secured access ports in the cloud to access and interrupt workloads and data in the cloud. Malware, Zero-Day, Account Takeover and many other malicious threats have become a daily reality.
Lack of Visibility and Tracking
In the IaaS model, cloud providers have complete control over the infrastructure layer and do not place it in front of customers. The lack of visibility and control is further exacerbated in PaaS and SaaS cloud models. Cloud clients are often unable to effectively identify and quantify their cloud assets or view their cloud environments.
Ever-Changing Workloads
Cloud assets are dynamically expanding and disintegrating, both at scale and at high speed. Traditional security tools cannot enforce protection policies in a flexible and dynamic environment with its changing and transient workload.
DevOps, DevSecOps and Automation
Organizations that have adopted a highly automated DevOps CI / CD culture should ensure that appropriate security controls are identified at the beginning of the development cycle and embedded in code and templates. Changes related to the security established after the deployment of the workload in production can affect the security attitude and duration of the organization and the timing of marketing.
Granular Privilege and Key Management
Often, the roles of cloud users are set up very freely, in addition to what is intended or required to be granted extended privileges. A common example is granting permissions to delete or write to a database that requires untrained or non-business users to delete or add items to the database. At the application level, misconfigured keys and privileges lead sessions to security risks.
Complex Environments
Methods that work seamlessly between public cloud providers, private cloud providers, and local facilities are needed to consistently manage security in today’s hybrid and multi-cloud environments driven by today’s business. .
Cloud Compliance and Governance
All major cloud providers have joined most popular accreditation programs, such as PCI 3.2, NIST 800–53, HIPAA, and GDPR. However, it is the responsibility of customers to ensure that their workload and data processes match. Due to the poor visibility and dynamics of the cloud environment, the compliance verification process becomes almost impossible without the use of tools for ongoing compliance checks and real-time alerts on incorrect configurations.
What Is Zero Trust Security?
Zero Trust is a shift from network advocacy to a more comprehensive IT security model that allows organizations to limit access controls to networks, applications, and the environment without sacrificing performance and user experience. In short, no one trusts the Zero Trust approach. As more organizations perform more computing outside of their perimeter in the cloud, it is becoming increasingly difficult for security teams to allow or trust who or what should be given permission or trust to access their networks. As a result, more and more organizations are taking the Zero Trust as an element or part of their trust network architecture and corporate security strategy.
What is a Zero Trust architecture?
A traditional or perimeter network security approach is intended to keep attackers out of the network, but vulnerable to network users and devices. Traditional network security architecture utilizes firewalls, VPNs, access controls, IDSs, IPSs, SIEMs, and e-mail gateways by building multiple security layers on the perimeter that cyberattackers have learned to breach. By default, users of the network trust the “Verify and then trust” security. Someone with direct user credentials can access the full range of sites, applications, or devices that can be accessed online. Zero Trust assumes that the network has been compromised and challenges you to prove that the user or device is not an attacker. Zero Trust requires strict verification of the identity of each user and device when attempting to access network resources, even if the user or device is already on the network perimeter. Zero Trust also allows you to restrict a user’s access to the network once, by preventing an attacker who enters a network access from side access in a network application.
● The principles of the Zero Trust architecture are as follows: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST):
● All data sources and computer services are considered as sources.
● All communications are secure regardless of network location; network location does not imply trust.
● Access to individual assets is provided for each connection; trust in the applicant is valued before access is granted.
● Access to resources is determined by the policies, including the observer status of the user identity and the requesting system, and may have other characteristics of behavior.
● The company ensures that all owned and associated systems are in the most secure state and monitors the systems to ensure they remain in the most secure state.
● User authentication is dynamic and strictly enforced before access is allowed; it is a continuous cycle of access, threat analysis and evaluation, adaptation and ongoing authentication.
Zero Trust security benefits
Zero Trust enables organizations to reduce the risk of cloud and container deployment by improving management and compliance. Organizations can obtain information about users and devices by identifying threats and maintaining control over a network. A Zero Trust approach can help an organization identify business processes, data flows, users, data and associated risks. A Zero Trust model helps create policies that can be automatically updated based on the identified risks.
Organizations transitioning from traditional perimeter security to a zero-confidence model are increasing the level of continuous authentication, allowing these methods to be detected more quickly and often stopped before an intrusion occurs:
● Phishing emails from employees
● Lateral movement through the corporate network
● Shell redirect service, putting a corporate computer at risk
● Developer password password
● Database credentials for stolen applications
● Database filtering through a dangerous host application
● Privileged application host through the workstation
● Use the developer password to increase the rights of the application host
● Access to privileged positions
● Key logger to work by increasing the privileges of the local facility
Best practices for implementing Zero Trust
Organizations wishing to establish a Zero Trust security framework should address the following:
● Identify sensitive data — Zero Trust requires an organization to identify and prioritize its data. Find out where he lives and who has access.
● Restrict and manage access — Switching to a Zero Trust security model requires you to set restrictions on the users, devices, applications, and processes that access the identified data. The least privileged access control model will be limited to the “need to know” basics.
● Detect Threats — Zero Trust requires continuous monitoring of all data access and sharing activities, comparing current activities based on past behavior and analysis. The combination of monitoring, behavior, rules, and security analytics increases the ability to detect internal and external threats.