The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Zero Trust (ZT) approach represents a shift in cybersecurity strategy, addressing the increasingly complex threat landscape. Enclave is a platform engineered to meet these complex needs, aligning with DoD’s ZT tenets and principles for comprehensive, proactive cybersecurity.
- Assuming a Hostile Environment: Enclave is designed considering an adversarial environment. Every user, device, and application is treated as potentially untrusted, mirroring the foundational principles of DoD’s ZT architecture.
- Presuming Breach: Enclave operates under the assumption that breaches are inevitable. It uses advanced monitoring, detection, and response technologies to identify potential breaches, accelerating incident response times and mitigating the impact of any potential security incidents.
- Never Trust, Always Verify: Every interaction within the Enclave environment is authenticated and authorized using the principle of least privilege, multiple attributes, and dynamic cybersecurity policies. Enclave supports robust multi-factor authentication (MFA) processes to ensure stringent identity verification.
- Scrutinize Explicitly: Enclave employs continuous monitoring, providing a granular view of network activities. This allows for dynamic changes in access based on user actions, enhancing security and mitigating potential threats.
- Unified Analytics Application: Enclave applies unified analytics for Data, Applications, Assets, and Services (DAAS). This includes behavioral analytics to improve anomaly detection and response, providing a robust defense against potential threats.
Enclave aligns with the seven principles of the DoD’s ZT Reference Architecture:
- Enclave eradicates any implicit or explicit trust zones, aligning with the first principle.
- It strictly enforces identity-based authentication and authorization, covering principles two and three.
- It continuously assesses risk profiles, leveraging near-real-time monitoring to authorize users and devices, thus upholding principle four.
- Enclave ensures the encryption of all sensitive data in transit and at rest, meeting principle five’s requirements.
- It supports continuous monitoring and analysis of events for security policy compliance, adhering to principle six.
- Lastly, Enclave’s centralized policy management and distribution align with principle seven.
Enclave also pioneers the shift towards considering all users “external” or untrusted. This approach mitigates risks from internal threats and reduces the reliance on VPNs, as all users undergo stringent authentication and authorization processes.
Furthermore, Enclave addresses the issues of implicit trust in previous deployments by enforcing micro-segmentation. This strategy limits communication between devices, preventing lateral movement of potential threats, and enhancing network security.
Enclave goes beyond these principles by establishing a robust asset inventory, handling unauthorized assets, and using active and passive discovery tools. Its capabilities extend to configuring data access control lists, implementing and managing firewalls on servers and end-user devices, and ensuring the use of secure network management and communication protocols.
With Enclave, the DoD can rest assured that its Zero Trust needs are comprehensively addressed. By embodying the DoD’s ZT principles, Enclave delivers a robust, flexible, and proactive cybersecurity solution for today’s digital defense landscape.
