Date Published: July 19, 2023
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Announcement
The Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) team at NIST's National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has published the third version of volumes B and C of a preliminary draft practice guide titled "Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture” and is seeking the public's comments on their contents.
This guide summarizes how the NCCoE and its collaborators are using commercially available technology to build interoperable, open standards-based ZTA example implementations that align to the concepts and principles in NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture.
The updated versions of volumes B and C describe ten ZTA implementations, demonstrating how blends of commercially available technologies can be integrated and brought into play to build various types of ZTAs. We will continue to update the volumes of NIST SP 1800-35 appropriately as needed as we make significant progress on the project.
As an enterprise’s data and resources have become distributed across the on-premises environment and multiple clouds, protecting them has become increasingly challenging. Many users need access from anywhere, at any time, from any device. The NCCoE is addressing these challenges by collaborating with industry participants to demonstrate several approaches to a zero trust architecture applied to a conventional, general-purpose enterprise IT infrastructure on-premises and in the cloud.
A zero trust architecture (ZTA) focuses on protecting data and resources. It enables secure authorized access to enterprise resources that are distributed across on-premises and multiple cloud environments, while enabling a hybrid workforce and partners to access resources from anywhere, at any time, from any device in support of the organization’s mission. Each access request is evaluated by verifying the context available at access time, including criteria such as the requester’s identity and role, the requesting device’s health and credentials, the sensitivity of the resource, user location, and user behavior consistency. If the enterprise’s defined access policy is met, a secure session is created to protect all information transferred to and from the resource. A real-time and continuous policy-driven, risk-based assessment is performed to establish and maintain the access. In this project, the NCCoE and its collaborators use commercially available technology to build interoperable, open, standards-based ZTA implementations that align to the concepts and principles in NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture. This NIST Cybersecurity Practice Guide explains how commercially available technology can be integrated and used to build various ZTAs.
A zero trust architecture (ZTA) focuses on protecting data and resources. It enables secure authorized access to enterprise resources that are distributed across on-premises and multiple cloud environments, while enabling a hybrid workforce and partners to access resources from anywhere, at any...
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A zero trust architecture (ZTA) focuses on protecting data and resources. It enables secure authorized access to enterprise resources that are distributed across on-premises and multiple cloud environments, while enabling a hybrid workforce and partners to access resources from anywhere, at any time, from any device in support of the organization’s mission. Each access request is evaluated by verifying the context available at access time, including criteria such as the requester’s identity and role, the requesting device’s health and credentials, the sensitivity of the resource, user location, and user behavior consistency. If the enterprise’s defined access policy is met, a secure session is created to protect all information transferred to and from the resource. A real-time and continuous policy-driven, risk-based assessment is performed to establish and maintain the access. In this project, the NCCoE and its collaborators use commercially available technology to build interoperable, open, standards-based ZTA implementations that align to the concepts and principles in NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture. This NIST Cybersecurity Practice Guide explains how commercially available technology can be integrated and used to build various ZTAs.
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Keywords
enhanced identity governance (EIG); identity, credential, and access management (ICAM); zero trust; zero trust architecture (ZTA)
Control Families
Access Control; Identification and Authentication; Risk Assessment; System and Communications Protection
