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Security20 January 2025·3 min read

Understanding Zero Trust security

Security work is mostly the business of removing footguns before someone finds them.

Paycux engineering

Security work is mostly the business of removing footguns before someone finds them. The interesting question is rarely whether an attack is possible — it is whether the ordinary path through your system makes it easy.

This piece walks through how we think about it at Paycux, what we have changed our minds about, and where the sharp edges are.

How it all started

Consider how it all started. Rotate on a schedule, not on an incident. A rotation path that has been exercised is a routine change; one that has never been used is an outage waiting for the worst possible moment.

Detection beats prevention when prevention is uncertain. If you cannot stop a class of abuse outright, make sure it produces a signal loud enough that someone sees it the same day.

How the Zero Trust model works

How the Zero Trust model works is where this gets concrete. Detection beats prevention when prevention is uncertain. If you cannot stop a class of abuse outright, make sure it produces a signal loud enough that someone sees it the same day.

Blast radius is the metric that actually matters. A credential that can read one organization's data is an incident; the same credential scoped to every organization is a company-ending event, and the difference is a design decision made months earlier.

  • Scope credentials to the smallest useful blast radius
  • Alert on the abuse you cannot prevent
  • Exercise the rotation path before you need it
  • Log the decision, not just the outcome

WebAuthN and passkeys in Zero Trust

WebAuthN and passkeys in Zero Trust deserves its own treatment. Detection beats prevention when prevention is uncertain. If you cannot stop a class of abuse outright, make sure it produces a signal loud enough that someone sees it the same day.

Detection beats prevention when prevention is uncertain. If you cannot stop a class of abuse outright, make sure it produces a signal loud enough that someone sees it the same day.

Rotate on a schedule, not on an incident.

How Paycux can help with Zero Trust

That brings us to how paycux can help with zero trust. Blast radius is the metric that actually matters. A credential that can read one organization's data is an incident; the same credential scoped to every organization is a company-ending event, and the difference is a design decision made months earlier.

Rotate on a schedule, not on an incident. A rotation path that has been exercised is a routine change; one that has never been used is an outage waiting for the worst possible moment.

Where this leaves us

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary discipline of deciding what you own, writing down what you assume, and making the failures loud enough to notice.

If you are working through the same problem and want to compare notes, the docs cover the mechanics and the console shows the behaviour on your own data.

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