Zero Trust
A security model that never trusts any request by default, even from inside the network. Every request must be authenticated, authorized, and encrypted regardless of origin.
What is Zero Trust?
A security model that never trusts any request by default, even from inside the network. Every request must be authenticated, authorized, and encrypted regardless of origin.
Zero Trust is a intermediate-level concept that sits in the Security Architecture area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Zero Trust" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
Learn Zero Trust in depth
Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
Open the Zero Trust lessonRelated lessons
Lessons that touch on Zero Trust as part of a larger topic.
Context-Aware Access Control
Combining multiple signals, device, location, behavior, risk score, to make dynamic access decisions in real time
intermediate · security architecture
Mutual TLS (mTLS)
Both client and server verify each other's certificates, two-way authentication for zero-trust architectures
intermediate · security architecture
See also
Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
mTLS
Mutual TLS: both client and server present certificates to authenticate each other. Standard in service mesh architectures where every service verifies its peers.
RBAC
Role-Based Access Control: assigns permissions to roles (admin, editor, viewer), then assigns roles to users. Simpler to manage than per-user permissions.
OAuth
An authorization framework that lets users grant third-party apps limited access to their accounts without sharing passwords. Powers 'Sign in with Google.'