Cyber Security Trends
- Zero Trust Architecture: Zero trust is becoming increasingly pervasive and granular, having vendors move toward built-in security models. Many vendors will continue to focus on their individual contributions toward a more pervasive architecture described in NIST SP 800-207, “Zero Trust Architecture” for 2021. Key technologies such as attestation are beginning to enable verification that systems and software are as expected. Automated verification is one of the key tenets of zero trust models enabling built-in security, provided by the originating vendor. All major hardware and hyperscaler vendors provide attestation from a root of trust for hardware and firmware verification today. In 2021, attestation and use of reporting through remote attestation will support container and workload verification if not more, such as operating system and application security. Attestations will be aligned to trusted controls, such as the CIS Controlsand CIS Benchmarksfor Kubernetes and Docker, similar to how firmware attestation policy and measurements align to NIST SP 800-193 for Firmware Resiliency. This built-in capability will better enable organizations with limited resources to deploy and manage more secure environments. Several large vendors have attestation capabilities in development or released for containers and workloads; this will become standardized and expected to enable automated, simplified posture assessment.
- Encryption: This shift of control verification to the endpoint is increasingly important as encryption use at the object and transport level rises. There are big thrusts at the moment to ensure systems are capable of maintaining data confidentiality via encryption, where data and executables are protected except at the point of execution, as can be seen in announcements such as Microsoft’s Pluton and the industry consortium work of the Linux Foundation’s Confidential Computing Consortium.Encryption in multi-tenant environments between protected container instances is already standard. Use of encryption will increase at the object level in cloud environments, accelerating the shift to security being managed at the endpoint. Shifts to strong transport encryption on internal networks will likely not happen in 2021, although technology shifts to support it will begin to take hold.I’ve outlined a vision for the next 5-10 years in “Transforming Information Security: Optimizing Five Concurrent Trends to Reduce Resource Drain” after much consideration.
