Zero trust and its roots Jericho Forum

With all the hype and marketing around zero trust, if we step back and look at our history, isn’t this the same concept discussed and presented by the Jericho Forum in the early to mid 2000s?

This is the question posed by Michael Poezyn, director of security at Derivco, who will speak on “The Jericho Forum – were they devins?”, during the ITWeb Security Summit 2022, which will be held from May 31 to June 2. at the Sandton Convention Center.

And he’s not wrong. Some of the earliest work on what we now call zero trust began in an international consortium called the Jericho Forum, whose goal was to define and promote deperimetrization, a revolutionary concept that instead sought ways to protect both the ingress and egress of corporate data through the network.

The Jericho Forum was made up of like-minded CISOs who struggled with the obvious limitations of a mainstream security posture that believed all resources could be secured by keeping them on a “secure” network behind a solid perimeter.

This decision to secure the assets where they are, as Poezyn puts it, has proven to be quite prophetic.

According to him, “deperimetrization” was not a catchy phrase that sold. “The pandemic has forced many companies to send their staff home and in some cases render ineffective the millions of information security controls and technologies that were built with the mindset of everyone in a controlled office space.”

During his presentation, he will focus on the concept of challenging the current location of the actual security perimeter and using some of the lessons learned from Derivco’s journey to achieve this.

He will discuss identity as a new perimeter and explain how, for those who still only use username and password as a mechanism to identify their users, it’s not a matter of “you have “belonged”, but rather a matter of “when” they will be owned.

“There is no silver bullet to your information security challenges; maintaining a thorough philosophy of security defense is your best strategy,” he concludes.