Zero Trust Architecture & Attack Surface

Zero trust is a single idea taken seriously: stop treating "inside the network" as a permission. No standing access, no trusted interior, every request to every resource authorized on its own (identity, device posture, live context) and re-checked continuously. That collapses the blast radius of a breach, but it does not delete the attack surface, it moves it onto identity and the control plane. Here is the model, the NIST components, how it contains lateral movement, and where attackers go.