The goal of this project is to use 4 years to establish the Information Security Center at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology as a representative international research center for zero-trust architecture. Due to the increasing prevalence of advanced persistent threats and remote work trends, deploying firewalls at the network boundary is no longer sufficient to effectively prevent malicious attacks. Zero trust architecture requires organizations not to trust anybody implicitly. Instead, organizations must authenticate and control access based on the context of each request, reducing the risk of stolen credentials or compromised devices. As a result, many countries are promoting relevant regulations to request organizations to establish ZTA. For example, the United States require its government agencies to achieve the goal of zero trust architecture in identity management, device security, network security, application security, and data security. In Taiwan, the National Institute of Cyber Security is promoting zero-trust architecture through identity authentication, device authentication, and trust inference. The NTUST Information Security Center has abundant research achievements in software and hardware security inspection, mobile application security, IoT and IIoT security, and smartcard security. The research topics are closely related to the key pillars, such as identity authentication and access control, device security, and application security, in zero trust architecture. Also, the NTUST Information Security Center has already collaborated with several international companies on zero trust architecture. The project consists of five sub-projects that focus on identity authentication, device security, trust and risk assessment, risk-based access control, and the resilience of information security mechanisms.
The research is expected to produce internationally competitive results and publish them in top international journals and conferences. In addition to publishing papers, this project will expand its international influence in the following areas: (1) collaboration with renowned scholars in relevant international fields; (2) developing evaluation metrics and benchmarks for zero-trust products; (3) actively participating in the development of relevant standards, with the aim of becoming one of the representative units in the zero-trust architecture field. The outputs of this project can hopefully support the Taiwanese government to promote zero trust architecture, thereby improving the information security of government agents and enterprises in Taiwan.