The Role of Zero-Trust Architecture in Mitigating Supply Chain Attacks

Supply chain security is an increasingly prominent issue. As attacks rise in both frequency and severity, it’s never been more important to capitalize on zero-trust architecture.

A staggering 98% of organizations today have felt negative consequences from cybersecurity incidents within their supply chains. Despite how common these attacks are, many businesses still do not do enough to address third-party risks. A zero-trust approach could help.

How Zero-Trust Mitigates Supply Chain Attacks

Zero-trust architecture reshapes IT networks around two key principles — trust nothing and verify everything. It assumes all network activity is suspicious until proven otherwise instead of only investigating signs of a potential breach. While it may seem extreme, this approach has several benefits for supply chain security. 

Verifying All Identities

First, zero-trust architecture verifies that every user, device and application is what it appears. Because it restricts access privileges on a granular level, it requires people and endpoints to prove their identity before doing anything. That’s an important edge in a network as complex as a supply chain.

Supply chains are vast — the average automaker has 250 tier-one suppliers — so there are many opportunities for someone to slip through the cracks. Verifying all identities at multiple steps throughout a workflow makes it far harder for an impostor to make it through.

Limiting Lateral Movement

Of course, verification may not catch an authorized account that a criminal was able to break into. Thankfully, the zero-trust philosophy also accounts for this probability. It employs the principle of least privilege, which holds that every user or entity can only access what they need to complete their roles.

Limiting permissions as much as possible stops lateral movement, where an attack spreads from one area of the network to another. Any breached account or service will have limited reach, mitigating the breach’s impact. This is a huge advantage, as lateral movement is one of the primary reasons why supply chain attacks are so damaging.

Minimizing Attackers’ Visibility

Those restrictions also make zero-trust environments harder for attackers to analyze. While maximizing internal visibility is crucial for supply chain security, networks must remain opaque to outsiders. Cybercriminals can easily find and exploit vulnerabilities when it’s obvious how a system works.

Because zero-trust architecture is so segmented, who has access to what data or what apps connect to others is not clear to anyone but high-level administrators. As a result, cybercrime reconnaissance becomes far more challenging. IT leaders will be able to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers can discover them.

Enabling Better Vulnerability Management

Relatedly, zero trust ensures smoother vulnerability management. Many supply chains must undergo regular threat analyses, as some regulations require annual assessments, but even those that don’t need to should stay abreast of emerging threats. Proactive risk management is key to strong security, and such action is easier in a zero-trust system.

In a conventional setup, weak points often go unnoticed until someone exploits them or a security expert looks for them. Because zero trust considers everything suspicious by design, it naturally entails continuous risk analysis. Consequently, businesses can find potential weaknesses and address them in less time.

How to Implement Zero-Trust Architecture

Modern supply chains need zero-trust architecture to remain safe in today’s environment. While each system may differ slightly, the overall process for implementing this philosophy follows a few universal steps.

1. Identify All Users and Assets

The first step in implementing zero-trust architecture is identifying every user who will use the network. Admins must log every user, their name, their role in the supply chain and what they currently access. It’s also important to apply this to non-person entities and network assets like files and programs.

Network mapping this thorough can take weeks or months when done manually, so automation is often the best way forward. Artificial intelligence (AI) can scan a network to compile a complete, in-depth list far faster and with fewer errors than even expert employees can.

2. Map Out Workflows

Once businesses understand all the users and assets on their network, they must map out how those elements interact. This means defining who accesses what data at which points and why. Creating a formal map of everyone’s workflow will make it easier to determine appropriate restrictions.

Once again, automation may be necessary here. It’s also a good idea to give each interaction a risk score depending on the data’s sensitivity or how many people can access a given service. Such scores will reveal which steps in the workflow deserve tighter restrictions or priority when monitoring activity.

3. Define Access Privileges

Next comes the most obvious step in implementing zero-trust architecture — restricting access privileges. Using the list of all users and the assets they use during normal workflows, define what each account requires access to. Err on the side of over-restricting, as privilege misuse is the most common nonaccidental factor in insider breaches.

The network’s structure should facilitate these restrictions. For example, a business could store varying datasets in separate locations to make it easier to grant access to some but not all of the information.

4. Use Strong Authentication Measures

Tight access controls are crucial, but they only work when they coincide with reliable authentication measures. Passwords are too vulnerable to be secure. A zero-trust system must use something more robust, like multi-factor authentication (MFA).

MFA dramatically reduces the chances of a breached insider account, but organizations can also go further for highly sensitive accounts or databases. Automated behavioral biometrics provide an additional layer of security by noticing when a user or entity’s behavior is out of the norm, suggesting a breach.

5. Deploy, Monitor and Scale

Now it’s time to put these steps into action. While businesses can build and manage their own zero-trust architecture, many may need to turn to security experts for help. The growing cybersecurity workforce shortage may leave companies without the internal talent necessary, but many security firms offer zero-trust services.

After deploying such network architecture, organizations should monitor their success, noting any points of friction or mistakes. Addressing these as they arise will help scale the solution in the future.

Zero-Trust Architecture Is Critical for Modern Supply Chains

Today’s supply chains face skyrocketing cybersecurity needs. Conventional approaches to network administration are too risky amid that trend. It’s time to move to zero trust, and learning its benefits is the first step to taking advantage of it.