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Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

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Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#21

Post by oscarcp »

cyanydeez wrote: post #16
insanitybit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be paired with deterministic controls. So you have, for example, "engineers can only read from the database, and only after they've perform a 2FA" but then there's context like "why is this engineer reading from the payments table when their IP is in a weird location and they're supposed to be on PTO?" and perhaps that's something a model decides. It's possible to turn that second thing into a sort of "ris…

Non of it really matters if the end product is just going to be ignored because there's zero people who want to be the guard in the panopticon and therefore, it'll still be given to an AI to watch and make it's dumb decisions about how trust worthy you are to do X, Y and Z. Even if the middle is deterministic, if one end is just going to be lazily hooked up to an AI, it's the shitty dystopian future.

That just gave me shivers down my spine of people eventually becoming so lazy that the AI will decide who to fire based on a massive amount of circumstantial data that very likely has tiny cumulative errors that will lead to classifying your best personnel as a bums and liabilities.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#22

Post by prmph »

insanitybit wrote: post #12
oscarcp wrote: post #6

Am I undertanding this correctly? The idea is to have ultimately an AI decide if I can have access to a resource based on dynamic inference, identity , intent and service signals that can easily be manipulated? Unless I gravely misunderstood the text, this seems like a terrible idea (fancy non-scifi, but still terrible)

This would be paired with deterministic controls. So you have, for example, "engineers can only read from the database, and only after they've perform a 2FA" but then there's context like "why is this engineer reading from the payments table when their IP is in a weird location and they're supposed to be on PTO?" and perhaps that's something a model decides. It's possible to turn that second thing into a sort of "ris…

This is going to make things worse for all kind of use cases that are legitimate but seem non-standard or marginal.

Heck, many websites I visit on the web cannot understand why I, a Ghanaian living in Ghana, might be interested in the service offered or the information therein. I am sometimes blocked for no good reason.

If you are in a third world country, the web is extra hostile. This is going make things worse.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#23

Post by geoctl »

stogot wrote: post #11

Zero trust is deterministic. AI is non-deterministic Non-deterministic access controls is Terrible idea

I've been working on an open source ZTNA project/product https://github.com/octelium/octelium for many years and I am actually very open to the idea. Machine learning has already been in use for years when it comes to anomaly detection. Maybe modern LLMs can be used to automate access control, partially or fully at enterprise scale in the future. The idea is to have a policy engine that's controlled by AI that uses a mix of long-term semi-static info such as group memberships and permission boundaries, short-term info such as behavior (e.g. access logs) and current session's authentication strength level (AAL) such as FIDO as well as near real-time external information (e.g. IdP, SIEM, threat intelligence, on-call management) to dynamically adjust users' access control to build up some sort of a context for each user and each session that can increase or decrease permissions without having to manually add policy rules or going through request/approval flows, while optimizing for the main objective (i.e. minimizing access grants for every subject to any resource under whatever context unless when it's necessary). This can be unified for both humans and non-human identities, including agents.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#24

Post by heisgone »

stogot wrote: post #11

Zero trust is deterministic. AI is non-deterministic Non-deterministic access controls is Terrible idea

From Google point of view, their users are nothing more than a statistic. An hacked account is a statistic. No surprise they see software that way.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#25

Post by kriro »

""" Beyond Zero shifts the trust boundary from the application to the action being performed on a piece of data in realtime—and from after-the-fact investigation to in-the-moment evaluation and containment. It augments BeyondCorp’s foundational identity with a “brain” capable of reasoning about the context and intent of a specific request in realtime. """

Doesn't this simply shift the attack vector? Compromising this overlord brain now becomes a new target.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#26

Post by skinfaxi »

prmph wrote: post #22
insanitybit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be paired with deterministic controls. So you have, for example, "engineers can only read from the database, and only after they've perform a 2FA" but then there's context like "why is this engineer reading from the payments table when their IP is in a weird location and they're supposed to be on PTO?" and perhaps that's something a model decides. It's possible to turn that second thing into a sort of "ris…

This is going to make things worse for all kind of use cases that are legitimate but seem non-standard or marginal. Heck, many websites I visit on the web cannot understand why I, a Ghanaian living in Ghana, might be interested in the service offered or the information therein. I am sometimes blocked for no good reason. If you are in a third world country, the web is extra hostile. This is going make things worse.

> This is going make things worse.

Isn't this for enterprises managing access to corporate resources?

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#27

Post by thomascgalvin »

kriro wrote: post #25

""" Beyond Zero shifts the trust boundary from the application to the action being performed on a piece of data in realtime—and from after-the-fact investigation to in-the-moment evaluation and containment. It augments BeyondCorp’s foundational identity with a “brain” capable of reasoning about the context and intent of a specific request in realtime. """ Doesn't this simply shift the attack vector? Compromising this…

This is a layer on top of normal security, so this isn't a matter of compromising the "brain" instead of RBAC, etc, but in addition to.

Attribute-based access control is already a thing. User X logs in the US East between the hours of 6am and 6pm. If User X logs in from Russia at 3am, deny access. This seems like an evolution of that pattern

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#28

Post by butterclaw-tech »

kriro wrote: post #25

""" Beyond Zero shifts the trust boundary from the application to the action being performed on a piece of data in realtime—and from after-the-fact investigation to in-the-moment evaluation and containment. It augments BeyondCorp’s foundational identity with a “brain” capable of reasoning about the context and intent of a specific request in realtime. """ Doesn't this simply shift the attack vector? Compromising this…

One partial answer is to not make it a single brain. If the reasoning layer that evaluates a request is independently audited by a second pass at lower temperature with an explicit skepticism mandate, compromising the evaluator requires compromising both passes simultaneously — and they're running the same local model with different system prompts and no shared state between them. Doesn't eliminate the attack surface but raises the cost considerably compared to a single inference gate.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#29

Post by prmph »

skinfaxi wrote: post #26
prmph wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to make things worse for all kind of use cases that are legitimate but seem non-standard or marginal. Heck, many websites I visit on the web cannot understand why I, a Ghanaian living in Ghana, might be interested in the service offered or the information therein. I am sometimes blocked for no good reason. If you are in a third world country, the web is extra hostile. This is going make things worse.

> This is going make things worse. Isn't this for enterprises managing access to corporate resources?

I'm talking about the general direction this is taking.

I don't think once this is established in enterprises it is going to stop there.

Re: Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era

#30

Post by butterclaw-tech »

insanitybit wrote: post #12
oscarcp wrote: post #6

Am I undertanding this correctly? The idea is to have ultimately an AI decide if I can have access to a resource based on dynamic inference, identity , intent and service signals that can easily be manipulated? Unless I gravely misunderstood the text, this seems like a terrible idea (fancy non-scifi, but still terrible)

This would be paired with deterministic controls. So you have, for example, "engineers can only read from the database, and only after they've perform a 2FA" but then there's context like "why is this engineer reading from the payments table when their IP is in a weird location and they're supposed to be on PTO?" and perhaps that's something a model decides. It's possible to turn that second thing into a sort of "ris…

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