Zero-Trust Architecture for Autonomous Edge Computing

We are at the apex of an aviation revolution where autonomy will play a central role in enabling complex, multi-agent
systems to communicate, interact, and collaborate on a myriad of applications spanning autonomous swarms to wild-fire
management. Autonomy is not an absolute but rather a spectrum ranging from a system requiring significant human
intervention to one requiring little to none [1]. For example, the extreme, in the case of an autonomous aircraft, is one
that operates independently in the airspace interacting with all other elements (air traffic controllers, other pilots) as if it
were a human pilot. Critical to this vision is an architecture that enables autonomous agents to interact with minimal
latency. Edge computing is an emerging architecture where compute and storage is pushed to the ‘edge’ of the network in
order to minimize the round-trip time from agent to resource thereby mitigating the latency associated with cloud-only
based approaches. Additionally, services can generate massive amounts of data (e.g., video feeds), which may require
analysis in near real-time. Moving this data to the cloud for further processing may not be feasible due to latency,
bandwidth, and cost. Privacy, security, and reliability can also be improved by edge computing architectures.
However, this geo-distributed and dynamic* architecture complicates the establishment of unambiguous network
security boundaries and can lead to vulnerabilities including man in the middle attacks, replay attacks, physical security
breaches of edge nodes, signal interception, etc. This motivates the need for zero-trust architectures [2–4] which
de-emphasize the notion of static network perimeters and, as the name implies, do not instill any innate trust in any
particular agent. It is required that all agents must be authorized and approved in every transaction. In this paper, we
present a zero-trust architecture suitable for edge-computing applications that demand significant low-latency, security,
privacy, and reliability.