Design of Cloud-Edge-Gateway Collaborative Zero-Trust Architecture and Workflow for Smart Factories

Zero-trust architecture (ZTA) has been viewed as a powerful security framework to deal with the increasingly complex network environment and connection exposure in high-risk environments. Since the standard ZTA was established in 2020, a large amount of research works have been carried out on ZTA. However, the centralized ZTA established by companies such as Huawei has the problem of single point of failure, which affects the security greatly. In addition, research works on the distributed ZTA pay less attention on the design of workflows, thus making it difficult to deploy their ZTAs in smart factories. In this paper, we establish a cloud-edge-gateway collaborative ZTA based on the distributed ZTA, named CEGC-ZTA, for smart factories. We design the workflow of CEGC-ZTA based on the software-defined perimeter (SDP) model. An implementation case of CEGC-ZTA is given in a smart factory scenario. Simulations and theoretical analysis show that CEGC-ZTA has a superior performance in terms of both the security and efficiency.