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Informative Article | Information Technology | India | Volume 12 Issue 12, December 2023 | Rating: 3.2 / 10

Zero Knowledge Proof Techniques in PAM Authentication

Sri Kanth Mandru

Abstract: Conventionally, organizations have used Privileged Access Management (PAM) techniques to secure, control, and monitor access to their critical information and resources. The PAM concepts have envisioned designing protocols that help protect user accounts that are deemed to have access to sensitive data ?the most valuable asset of a business. While in the past these techniques have proven vital to data protection and security, the onset of increasingly sophisticated technologies and more determined malicious actors warrants a change of data control and privacy strategies. It becomes impossible to secure a system to achieve 100 percent efficiency. Any system that is attached to the internet is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Hackers have numerous ways to compromise systems if traditional boundary security mechanisms are deployed. Detecting an intrusion in such a setup becomes increasingly challenging if an attacker successfully breaches that boundary layer of defense. Since traditional authentication and authorization might not be reliable in network systems, the zero - knowledge proof model comes in handy. Adding the zero - knowledge proof to the PAM to authenticate users or members and disclose or anonymize them through decentralized identifiers helps in solving the identification and privacy protection problem. We propose a PAM and zero - knowledge proof - inspired approach to address the authentication, data security, and privacy concerns. A zero - knowledge proof is a method that allows the prover to prove to the verifier that they know a certain information without disclosing it.

Keywords: Cyber attacks, data breaches, data protection, privileged access management, zero knowledge

Edition: Volume 12 Issue 12, December 2023,

Pages: 2114 - 2119