Zero Trust Computing

Many Ransomware Attacks are based on the common misconception that all data inside your network is safe if you have a potent firewall system up and running. But when only one device is connected to the internet, the concepts of „in you network“ and „outside your networks“ don’t really mean much anymore. After all, if one device in your network is connected to the internet, all of them are.

Introducing: Zero Trust Computing

Until a few years ago, almost every business or organisation thought that security measures can be more relaxed when you are on premise and behind a firewall. Very few saw a need to secure ports or encrypt traffic inside your own network. Unencrypted login data and passwords, files that are conveniently stored on a Samba or Windows-Share with the „guest=ok“ option on, what could possibly go wrong. A deluge of ransomware attacks proved everybody wrong and many companies woke up to a hard reality where data was locked away or even tunneled out to criminals that used it to blackmail their victims.

We have long struggled to accept the line that you cannot simply trust your „own“ network, but over the course of the pandemic we quickly realized that „our own network“ is a very blurred concept. Is the road-warrior or the remote office staff now „on our network“ and if they are actually on our network, are their children, too?

As much as we trust our staff, we don’t trust the integrity of IT all too much. So we came up with a few new rules, that would – though being relatively short and simple would transform the way our IT works:

• minimal privileged for users and systems
• all network traffic between our system (regardless of where the machines are physically located) would be either encrypted or it would have to disappear by mid-2020. A target we matched.
• all backups will be encrypted when being created or inmediatly thereafter.
• no unencrypted or publicly accessible file shares of any kind (including backups).
• If a data transfer cannot be encrypted by on board means or the encryption does not meat our standards, it needs to be tunneled (usually using ssh). If this cannot be achieved, the process needed to be replaced by mid-2020
• backups are never ‚pushed to‘ a system, but only ‚pulled from‘ a system, so a compromised machine will not be able spread an infection to neighboring systems by knowing login credentials to the backup server.
• always use well designed standard tools like rsync, ssh or wire-guard.
• no local data saving (or as little as possible).

This concept is being called „zero trust“ and at the and of this transition process, we could not only swap or initially deploy new hardware using minimal resources, due to the use of standard tools, that for example come with every modern Linux distribution or MacOS system. We can now also scale our operation up and down (though mostly up) in a flexible and cost efficient way … and within days or sometimes hours, reducing overhead. So as we set up every device on our network to not have to trust any other device, we could finally start to trust our networking again.

And our staff loves it! No matter where they are: in one of the offices, remote in a camper van at the shores of the North-sea or the Adriatic Sea, at a conference in North America, backpacking through Thailand, at a roadhouse or in a tent: everyone connects to the internet via any connection available and work just like they were sitting in the office next door. Including their personal VoIP, fax (it is still a thing in Germany) and video chat. They switch on their computers and there’s everything right there.