How To Streamline Zero Trust Using The Shared Signals Framework

Zero Trust helps organizations shrink their attack surface and respond to threats faster, but many still struggle to implement it because their security tools don't share signals reliably. 88% of organizations admit they've suffered significant challenges in trying to implement such approaches, according to Accenture. When products can't communicate, real-time access decisions break down.

The Shared Signals Framework (SSF) aims to fix this with a standardized way to exchange security events. Yet adoption is uneven. For example, Kolide Device Trust doesn't currently support SSF.

Scott Bean, Senior IAM and Security Engineer at MongoDB, proposed a way to solve the problem, giving teams an easy and intuitive way to operationalize SSF across their environment.

In this guide, we'll share an overview of the workflow, plus step-by-step instructions for getting it up and running.

A core requirement of Zero Trust is continuous, reliable signals about user and device posture. But many tools don't support SSF for Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol (CAEP), making it hard to share or act on these signals.

Without this interoperability, organizations struggle to apply consistent policies — and in cases like Kolide Device Trust, critical device events never reach systems like Okta.

Because SSF is built on HTTPS requests, the OpenID standard works with Tines' HTTP Action.

Scott developed a new workflow integrating Kolide Device Trust with Tines, enabling it to send SSF signals to Okta. If a device is non-compliant, Kolide sends a message to the workflow via webhook. Tines enriches the signal, makes sure it can be linked to a user, builds a Security Event Token (SET), and then sends it to Okta.

In this way, Tines acts as the connective tissue that makes SSF work across the distributed IT environment, even if individual tools don't natively support the standard.

All of which makes Zero Trust enforcement faster, more reliable, and much easier to operationalize. IT teams are empowered with continuous, real-time risk assessment of devices, faster response to threats, and more flexible policy orchestration. And end users get the benefit of automated remediation, which helps to optimize productivity and minimize IT intervention.

Source: The Hacker News