Survivable zero trust for cloud computing environments

The security model relying on the traditional defense of the perimeter cannot protect modern dynamic organizations. The emerging paradigm called zero trust proposes a modern alternative that enforces access control on every request and avoids implicit trust based on the physical location of people and devices. These architectures rely on several trusted components, but existing proposals make the unrealistic assumption that attackers cannot compromise some of them. We overcome these assumptions and present a novel survivable zero trust architecture that can guarantee the necessary security level for cloud computing environments. The proposed architecture guarantees a high level of security and robustness and under specific conditions it can tolerate intrusions and can recover from failures and successful attacks. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.