Overview

What

Pomerium is an identity-aware access proxy. Pomerium can be used to:

enable secure remote access to internal websites, without a VPN.
provide unified authentication (SSO) using the identity provider of your choice.
enforce dynamic access policy based on context, identity, and device state.
aggregate access logs and telemetry data.

Why

Perimeter security's shortcomings

For years, secure remote access meant firewalls, network segmentation, and VPNs. However, several high-profile security breaches have shown the limitations of perimeter security, namely:

Perimeter security does a poor job of addressing the insider-threat and 28% percent of breaches are by internal actors.
The impenetrable fortress theory of perimeter security is anything but in practice; most corporate networks have multiple entry points, lots of firewall rules, and constant pressure to expand network segmentation boundaries.
Even defining "what" a perimeter is is difficult as corporate networks have come to consist of an increasingly heterogeneous mix of on-premise, public, and private clouds.
VPNs frustrate end-users, give a false sense of security, and often fail to provide defense-in-depth.

Or for the visually inclined.

SSL added and removed here :^) - NSA

Zero-trust

Pomerium attempts to mitigate these shortcomings by adopting principles like:

Trust flows from identity, device-state, and context; not network location.
Treat both internal and external networks as completely untrusted.
Act like you are already breached, because you probably are.
Every device, user, and application's communication should be authenticated, authorized, and encrypted.
Access policy should be dynamic, and built from multiple sources.

This security model has typically been referred to as zero-trust or BeyondCorp-inspired.

Resources

Pomerium was inspired by the security model originally articulated by John Kindervag in 2010, and by Google in 2011 as a result of the Operation Aurora breach.

Books

Zero Trust Networks by Gilman and Barth

Papers

Forrester Build Security Into Your Network's DNA: The Zero Trust Network Architecture
Google BeyondCorp 1 An overview: "A New Approach to Enterprise Security"
Google BeyondCorp 2 How Google did it: "Design to Deployment at Google"
Google BeyondCorp 3 Google's front-end infrastructure: "The Access Proxy"
Google BeyondCorp 4 Migrating to BeyondCorp: Maintaining Productivity While Improving Security
Google BeyondCorp 5 The human element: "The User Experience"
Google BeyondCorp 6 Secure your endpoints: "Building a Healthy Fleet"

Posts

Videos

USENIX Enigma 2016 - NSA TAO Chief on Disrupting Nation State Hackers
What, Why, and How of Zero Trust Networking by Armon Dadgar, Hashicorp
O'Reilly Security 2017 NYC Beyondcorp: Beyond Fortress Security by Neal Muller, Google
Be Ready for BeyondCorp: enterprise identity, perimeters and your application by Jason Kent

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