Edge Security Paradox: How Zero Trust Architecture Created The...

Posted on Dec 19

• Originally published at harwoodlabs.xyz

The cybersecurity industry has a problem with solutions. We keep building more complex systems to solve the problems created by our previous complex systems, like a snake eating its own tail while insisting it's getting healthier.

The latest SonicWall vulnerability chain perfectly illustrates this paradox. Here we have a "secure access" platform, designed specifically for the zero trust world of remote work and edge computing, falling victim to exactly the kind of chained attack that zero trust was supposed to prevent. CVE-2025-40602, a privilege escalation flaw in SonicWall's SMA1000 access management console, is being exploited alongside an older critical vulnerability to compromise the very systems meant to be our security gatekeepers.

This isn't just another vulnerability story. It's evidence that our industry's rush toward complex edge security architectures has created more attack surface than it has eliminated.

Remember when zero trust was sold as the answer to everything? No more castle-and-moat thinking, no more implicit trust, no more perimeter security failures. Instead, we'd have intelligent edge devices making real-time trust decisions, sophisticated access management platforms, and security that followed users wherever they went.

The SonicWall SMA1000 platform embodies this vision perfectly. It's an appliance management console designed to handle secure remote access in a zero trust world. Multiple authentication layers, granular access controls, centralized policy management. Everything the experts told us we needed.

Yet here it sits, compromised by attackers who chained together two vulnerabilities to achieve exactly what zero trust promised to prevent: unauthorized access escalation through trusted systems. The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife.

What makes this particularly damning is that CVE-2025-40602, the newer vulnerability, only matters because of how it chains with CVE-2025-23006, the older critical flaw. SonicWall's own advisory makes this clear: the new vulnerability "requires either that CVE-2025-23006 remains unpatched, or that the threat actor already possesses access to a local system account."

This is complexity breeding vulnerability in real time. The more moving parts we add to our security architecture, the more ways those parts can fail in combination.

The conventional wisdom says that zero trust reduces attack surface by

Source: Dev.to