Can we trust the Zero in Zero trust? (WHY2025)

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Zero Trust (ZT) has evolved from pure network access to hype. ZT Everywhere has become a buzzword. If you ask about it during product presentations, the sales person sometimes runs out of the meeting. If we look beneath the surface, we find a lot of code that we trust in zero trust environments without realising it. Istio containers in service meshes, key management systems in SSH/Ansible environments and a whole lot of legacy code in confidential computing require trust in strange containers, ex-employees and attestation processes and a CI/CD pipeline for microcode in the cloud. What questions should we ask ZT? As the management of keys is crucial for TLS (encryption on transport), disk encryption (encryption on rest) and the new kid on the block confidential computing (encryption of data in use) we look under the carpet of implementations and raise a lot of questions to ask if implementing the concept. This immediately affects any digital souvereignty. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/3EHJGJ/