pomerium/docs/docs

title	lang	meta
Overview	en-US	name content keywords pomerium identity-access-proxy beyondcorp zero-trust reverse-proxy ztn

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

• Google Securing your business and securing your fleet the BeyondCorp way
• Google Preparing for a BeyondCorp world: Understanding your device inventory
• Google How BeyondCorp can help businesses be more productive
• Google How to use BeyondCorp to ditch your VPN, improve security and go to the cloud
• Wall Street Journal Google Moves Its Corporate Applications to the Internet

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