Demonstration of Low-overhead Zero Trust at the Tactical Warfighting Edge

In the context of the Tactical Warfighting Edge (TWE) with dynamic interactions of edge devices and users, cyber attacks can disrupt computation and communication tasks in a critical mission. Therefore, implementing a suitable Zero Trust (ZT) security architecture can enforce e.g., the law of least privilege, microsegmentation, and continuous authentication/access verification to limit attack impacts. Widely adopted methods in the enterprise settings such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) are unsuitable for the implementation of ZT in the TWE because they inherently violate the law of least privilege by overprovisioning privileges that results in undesired resource overheads, and are infeasible in TWE environments that are characterized as Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited (DDIL) environments. In this demo paper, we demonstrate our novel low-overhead ZT solution viz., “Arculus” that utilizes task-based access control (TBAC) to secure computation and communication tasks in the TWE by dynamically assigning and revoking privileges in a just-in-time manner. Using a collaborative drone swarm (CDS) use case, we will demonstrate simulations of a novel sliding scale ZT with TBAC algorithm that can secure computation and communication tasks to ensure mission success in a situation-aware manner, in the presence of DDIL constraints such as e.g., limited battery, physical hijacking and network partition scenarios for a “stealthy reconnaissance and resupply mission” in TWE settings.