Zero Trust in the Context of IoT: Industrial Literature Review, Trends, and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews non-academic literature to analyze current trends, challenges, and solutions for integrating IoT devices into Zero Trust cybersecurity architectures in industrial contexts.

Contribution

It consolidates industry knowledge, identifies gaps, and highlights future challenges for IoT integration into Zero Trust models based on a comprehensive literature review.

Findings

Many solutions lack full compliance with ZT standards.

Integration challenges stem from IoT device limitations and lifecycle.

Industry practices often diverge from academic research and standards.

Abstract

The Zero-trust (ZT) model is an increasingly popular model that relies on the idea that no trust should be granted to any entity (network, persons, devices) by default. ZT model is gaining attention from both research and practice, with various levels of adequation between research developed and real-life applications. NIST provided a standard to fulfill requirements of ZT architecture of network core but many practical aspects remain unspecified, some of them requiring solving first research challenges in order to be implemented efficiently. An example of such an unspecified field is the integration of IoT/Smart Peripheral Devices (SPD). Various reasons explain this gap: specificities of such resources (possibly lower energy/computation power), their lifecycle, and their use, strongly depending on the use of the whole platform IoT devices are part of. Moreover, additional difficulty to have a good understanding is induced by the fact that both Zero Trust and IoT are identified as promising trends in cybersecurity: many vendors/researchers tag their solutions as IoT integration into the ZT model, with little to no effective compliance to ZT model or standard. Industry is providing many practice-oriented literature, that has to be compared to academic work and standards, in order to consolidate the current state of knowledge and solutions offered to realize this integration. In this paper, we conduct a literature review of non-academic publications, in order to consolidate current knowledge, trends, and future challenges for the industrial integration of IoT devices in ZT architecture.