Trust-Free Homes: The Zero-Trust Paradigm in a Smart Home Setting

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the novel concepts which has taken the world by storm. Although the technology holds many advantages, the security concerns in these systems make them double-edged swords. Zero-Trust has been introduced as the answer to present-day cyber threats in the security industry. The segmentation of access rights, even within internal nodes of the system, is a vital feature of this model. This article describes the implementation of a Zero-Trust System to analyse its capabilities in IoT networks. Implementing Zero-Trust without affecting the regular functioning of IoT devices at scale is a challenge. The implementation was carried out by simulation of IoT devices’ behaviour using Microsoft Azure’s simulation capabilities to model the network, followed by a Python implementation of a very small IoT network. This article is aimed to serve as a guide to implementing a Zero-Trust network model.