A Platform-agnostic Solution for a Pluggable and Customizable Approach to Zero Trust Architecture

Every day, cybercriminals discover new methods to illegally access devices and networks. Cybercriminals not only compromise digital privacy, but also pose a risk to financial stability and reputation. These days, traditional security measures to safeguard the organization have proven insufficient. Consequently, the concept of zero trust was introduced. It is a new approach to cybersecurity that involves never trusting any device or entity without verifying them. Since its inception, various architectures were proposed and came into action. However, there is a lack of zero trust architecture that is customizable, deployable with ease, and is platform independent. In order to address this issue, we propose a platform-agnostic, pluggable, and customizable zero trust architecture that is easy to deploy and requires less migration downtime. It gives organizations the freedom to customize the users, resources, policies, access control, etc., supporting less migration downtime and the ability for novice users to maintain it. This research proposes the high-level step-by-step workflow of the architecture as well as various technical details needed at each step. This architecture can be extended as a base for various other future research projects utilizing zero trust security in different domains.