I traveled last week to Boston (MA, USA) to attend the 2023 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM) conference, which is the preeminent forum for innovative research applicable to all facets of military communications.
The work I presented, developed in collaboration with the Direction Générale de l’Armement (scientific branch of the French Army), present an innovative solution for federating zero trust architectures. Zero trust is a security paradigm for securing organizations, based on the core principle “never trust, always verify”. In zero trust architectures, every access to a resource needs to be explicitly verified: the identity of the requestor, its device, the security posture of its device, and its environment must be compliant with the security policy of the architecture, this policy following least-privilege and need-to-know principles.
On the paper
Zero trust architectures explicitly verify access attributes, describing the identity of the requestor, its device, and its security posture, before granting access or not to resources. In a federation, resources are to be shared with other domains in the federation. Therefore, if a requestor from a domain is to access a resource from another domain, the resource domain must explicitly verify access attributes describing the requestor. However, those attributes are usually derived by the domain of the requestor, as each domain has its own set of devices and manages identities for their entities. Thus, the domain hosting the resource would implicitly trust the domain of the requestor, which contradicts the zero trust principle, and weakens the security of the resource.
Zero Trust Federation based on Software-Defined Perimeters
The solution presented in the paper combines zero trust architectures with remote attestation. Remote attestation enables remote verification of components in charge of deriving requestor attributes. This remote verification relies on dedicated hardware, such as enclaves, or trusted platform modules, and on shared cryptographic secrets. A proof-of-concept implementation of a zero trust federation showcases the feasibility and the challenges encountered for combining several products to create a full zero trust federation.
The paper is available here.