Zero Trust Networks: Building Trusted Systems in Untrusted Networks

Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - 1:50pm2:45pm

Doug Barth, Stripe, and Evan Gilman, PagerDuty

Abstract: 

Let's face it - the perimeter-based architecture has failed us. Today's attack vectors can easily defeat expensive stateful firewalls and evade IDS systems. Perhaps even worse, perimeters trick people into believing that the network behind it is somehow "safe", despite the fact that chances are overwhelmingly high that at least one device on that network is already compromised.

It is time to consider an alternative approach. Zero Trust is a new security model, one which considers all parts of the network to be equally untrusted. Taking this stance dramatically changes the way we implement security systems. For instance, how useful is a perimeter firewall if the networks on either side are equally untrusted? What is your VPN protecting if the network you're dialing into is untrusted? The Zero Trust architecture is very different indeed. 

In this talk, we'll go over the Zero Trust model itself, why it is so important, what a Zero Trust network looks like, and what components are required in order to actually meet the challenge.

Doug Barth, Stripe

Doug is a Site Reliability Engineer at Stripe. With a deep interest in software, hardware, and production systems, he has spent his career using computers to solve hard problems. He helped deploy PagerDuty's IPsec mesh network, and is now working on a book about Zero Trust Networks.

Evan Gilman, PagerDuty

Evan is currently a Site Reliability Engineer at PagerDuty. With roots in academia, he finds passion in both reliable, performant systems, and the networks they run on. When he's not building automated systems for PagerDuty, he can be found at the nearest pinball table or working on his upcoming book, Zero Trust Networks.

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BibTeX
@conference {201839,
author = {Doug Barth and Evan Gilman},
title = {Zero Trust Networks: Building Trusted Systems in Untrusted Networks},
year = {2017},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}

Presentation Video 

Presentation Audio