Leveraging Zero Trust for Enhanced Security and Connectivity in Ad-Hoc Mesh Networks

The increasing complexity of cyber threats and the dynamic nature of mesh networks demand adaptive security solutions to ensure resilience, secure connectivity, and automated service configuration. Traditional security approaches struggle with the constantly changing topology and ad-hoc nature, making Zero Trust a promising paradigm for enhancing security while maintaining flexibility. This paper proposes ZETIn, a Zero Trust Infrastructure that leverages Generative AI and LLM-based chatbots to automate the configuration of security services in the Cloud Continuum, integrating a consensus protocol to enable seamless communication across ad-hoc mesh networks while enforcing strict security policies. Our experiments demonstrate that the Zero Trust architecture introduces minimal overhead, yet significantly improves connectivity, security, and automated service orchestration-making it a viable solution for missioncritical ad-hoc mesh networks.