Enhancing Zero Trust Cybersecurity using Machine Learning and Deep Learning Approaches

The recent Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) is progressively adopted to the develop network security by assuming no implicit trust within or outside an organization’s boundary. Though, ZTA faces substantial challenges in detecting sophisticated and developing cyber threats, particularly due to its trust on traditional security mechanisms that struggle to manage internal threats and sophisticated attack techniques. To report these shortcomings, the proposed study discovers the combination of advanced machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) performances to improve the anomaly detection proficiencies within ZTA environments. The study develops the CICIDS2017 dataset, which contains diverse and realistic network traffic patterns, to assess the efficiency of nine different models: Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Decision Tree, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Concluded comprehensive investigation and performance evaluation, the study validates that ensemble methods such as Random Forest and Decision Tree, together with deep learning models like LSTM and GRU, significantly exceed conventional models in terms of accuracy and detection abilities. The best-performing models attained up to 99.99% accuracy in recognizing malicious network activity. This exceptional performance validates that the strong potential of participating intelligent learning-based methods into ZTA to create scalable and dynamic security solutions with high accuracy. These findings illustrate the value of ML/DL in enhancing the threat detection layer of ZTA, eventually providing a stronger resistance to advanced attacks cyber threats.