Security News > 2022 > January > White House wants US govt to use a Zero Trust security model
A newly released Federal strategy wants the US government to adopt a "Zero trust" security model within the next two years to defend against current threats and boost cybersecurity defenses across federal agencies.
The executive order initiated a government-wide effort to migrate toward zero trust and modernize the nation's defenses against cyberattacks.
Key elements of the new zero trust strategy include improved phishing defense through strong multifactor authentication, consolidation of agency identity systems, encrypting traffic and treating internal networks as untrusted, and strengthening application security to protect data better.
Federal security teams and data teams work together to develop data categories and security rules to automatically detect and ultimately block unauthorized access to sensitive information.
The government migration to zero trust security principles comes after cybersecurity companies pushed the zero-trust network model for years.
Zero trust is a security approach where local devices and connections are never trusted and verification is needed at every step because defenders assume that intruders already have access to the network.