Zero Trust Model for Cloud Container Security
Abbas Kudrati, Sina Manavi, Muhammed Aizuddin Zali · 2025
Zero Trust architecture is a cybersecurity architecture model that works on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” As organizations increasingly migrate their workloads to the cloud, containerization has appeared as a fundamental technology for achieving scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. The chapter explores the key aspects of implementing Zero Trust in cloud-based containers, focusing on Identity and Access Management, network segmentation, continuous monitoring, and data security. Zero Trust emphasizes network segmentation and micro-segmentation to limit lateral movement and reduce the blast radius of potential breaches. Cloud workload protection platforms play a significant role in securing cloud-based containerized workloads. Zero Trust principles offer a robust security approach for Kubernetes environments by enforcing strict access controls, continuous verification, and micro-segmentation. The chapter explores two key areas: enforcing Pod Security Policies with Zero Trust principles and applying Zero Trust to service meshes like Istio and Linkerd.