Beyond Zero: Enterprise security for the AI era

Google security engineers introduce 'Beyond Zero', a next-generation enterprise security paradigm that extends the BeyondCorp/zero-trust model to address the challenges posed by AI agents and machine-speed data access. The model shifts trust boundaries from application-level to individual resource actions, combining static authorization policies with a dynamic AI-driven reasoning engine. Key components include autonomous governance (building an enterprise world model), event intake, a hierarchical reasoning engine capable of fast policy evaluation and slower anomaly detection, and a challenge/containment infrastructure for managing exceptions. The architecture is designed to authorize both human and AI agent actions in real time, detecting threats like rogue agents or compromised credentials through contextual, intent-based analysis. The authors call for industry-wide standards around agentic identities, pluggable policy evaluation, and agent context annotations.

Source: https://spawn-queue.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3819083. 8sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.