Zero Trust DNS and DDI: Strengthening Network Security

Zero Trust Security requires continuous verification and least-privilege access to protect distributed environments. EfficientIP’s Zero Trust DNS and DDI solutions enable full visibility, granular access control, real-time threat detection, and adaptive security, ensuring scalable, automated enforcement of Zero Trust policies across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Zero Trust – A Must-Have Security Strategy for Modern Networks

As hybrid and multi-cloud environments become the norm, traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer sufficient. The Zero Trust approach, grounded in the principle of “never trust, always verify,” replaces outdated models that assume implicit trust within network perimeters. Instead, it enforces continuous verification and least-privilege access, ensuring that all users, devices, and applications are authenticated and authorized before accessing resources. 

Zero Trust DNS and DDI extends the foundational capabilities of DDI, which provides a Network Source of Truth (NSoT), by integrating unmatched visibility into traffic and behavior, contextual intelligence and observability, and advanced DNS filtering for granular access control. By implementing these mechanisms with Zero Trust DDI alongside DNS Security, organizations can establish a Zero Trust strategy that reduces attack surfaces, prevents lateral movement, and strengthens corporate network resilience, ensuring that every access request is evaluated based on identity, behavior, and risk. 

Challenges in Implementing Zero Trust

Despite its security advantages, implementing Zero Trust across hybrid and multi-cloud environments presents several challenges. Lack of visibility is a major hurdle, as organizations struggle to maintain a comprehensive view of network activity, devices, and user interactions across distributed infrastructures.

A key obstacle is integration with existing infrastructure, cited by 39.6% of enterprises as a major challenge in the EMA Zero Trust Networking Report. Many legacy systems were not built for continuous authentication and granular access controls, making Zero Trust adoption complex and resource-intensive. These integration difficulties also hinder scalability, as Zero Trust must seamlessly extend across dynamic infrastructures, cloud environments, and evolving security needs without disrupting performance.

Additionally, network segmentation and access control enforcement require precise, real-time contextual data, yet many organizations lack the necessary tools to monitor and analyze network behavior effectively. Without these capabilities, attackers who have gained access can move laterally, exploiting security gaps and expanding their foothold in the corporate network. Firewall-based controls alone are insufficient, as 57.8% of enterprises still rely on security appliances for segmentation, which can introduce performance bottlenecks and limit flexibility (EMA report).

Successfully overcoming these challenges requires seamless policy enforcement, automated threat detection, and real-time insights to ensure scalability, visibility, and operational efficiency in Zero Trust architectures.

Implementing Zero Trust with EfficientIP’s DDI & DNS Security

To enforce Zero Trust, organizations need precise data, intelligent enforcement, and real-time visibility. DDI (DNS-DHCP-IPAM) provides the foundational Network Source of Truth (NSoT) required for continuous verification and access control. IPAM centralizes network data, while DNS offers unmatched visibility into traffic and behavior. EfficientIP’s SOLIDserver DDI and DNS Security solutions enable granular filtering and segmentation, real-time threat detection, and automated responses, ensuring scalable, seamless protection across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

IP Address Management (IPAM) as an Extended Network Source of Truth (NSoT)

A structured IP address plan is essential for maintaining the foundation of any IT system, ensuring seamless traffic routing across interconnected subnets. As a central repository for IP-related data and metadata—including endpoints, applications, and security zones—IPAM extends the Network Source of Truth (NSoT), providing single pane of glass visibility into network connectivity. By tracking, reconciling, and maintaining an accurate, up-to-date inventory of all connected devices and IP addresses and their metadata across networks, IPAM provides a solid foundation for policy enforcement, including by security components, playing a key role in Zero Trust.  

Micro-Segmentation and Advanced Access Control

EfficientIP’s DNS Security for Zero Trust enforces least-privilege access through Client Query Filtering (CQF), enabling precise user-based DNS filtering and micro-segmentation. By categorizing devices into groups—such as IoT, corporate workstations, and untrusted endpoints—CQF segments network assets down to a single device and applies tailored access policies for both internal and external applications.

Rather than simply blocking traffic, CQF acts as a first layer of protection by controlling access at the DNS level with high granularity, reducing the workload on other security components. Since CQF is not in-line, it introduces no latency issues, ensuring seamless connectivity. Security teams can define fine-grained DNS filtering policies based on device lists, client identities, and tags, assigning actions such as allow, deny, or quarantine.

For example, IoT devices require specific cloud services and management platforms to function but do not need access to corporate applications or sensitive data. Due to weak security controls and infrequent updates, these devices are vulnerable to malware, lateral movement, and botnet attacks, posing risks to the broader network if compromised.

With EfficientIP’s Client Query Filtering (CQF), security policies can be customized to ensure IoT devices connect only to allowed domains. For instance, devices tagged as IoT (in list2) are restricted to communicating only with domains classified as IoT-related (in list1). This prevents unauthorized requests from being resolved at the DNS level, effectively blocking unapproved connections, as shown in the screenshot below.

If a smart thermostat attempts to connect to a malicious domain, CQF immediately blocks the request, preventing escalation. Similarly, a corporate user device can be configured with a CQF rule to block access to high-risk domain categories, such as gaming or file-sharing platforms, while still allowing access to business-critical tools like SaaS applications and internal VPNs.

By analyzing both the requesting client identity e.g. source and requested domain names e.g. destination, CQF applies differentiated actions according to policies, reinforcing DNS’s essential role in Zero Trust enforcement. 

Centralized Management of Policies

Zero Trust security requires consistent enforcement of policies across all network environments. EfficientIP’s DDI solution centralizes the management of network and security policies, ensuring consistency across infrastructures. It enables the definition, deployment, and enforcement of security policies enterprise-wide, supporting hybrid and remote work environments with uniform security controls. Centralized management is a key enabler of a Zero Trust strategy by:

• Ensuring Consistency Across Infrastructures and Work Locations: Maintains uniform security policies across on-premises, cloud, and remote environments.
• Automating Granular Policy Enforcement and Access Control: Streamlines end-to-end security policy deployment across private and public SaaS apps to strengthen network segmentation.
• Reducing the Attack Surface and Mitigating Lateral Threat Movement: Minimizes security gaps to support application zoning and contain threats.

Additionally, it reduces operational complexity with a unified security framework. This ensures Zero Trust principles are consistently enforced while protecting critical assets and reducing security gaps.

Continuous Monitoring for Advanced Threat Detection

EfficientIP’s patented DNS Transaction Inspection (DTI) technology provides granular visibility and real-time analysis of internal DNS traffic. By combining this capability with multi-factor traffic analysis, DTI supports User Behavioral Analysis to detect threat activity and anomalous traffic patterns early. This enables organizations to proactively identify and address emerging risks, reinforcing their Zero Trust security posture.

EfficientIP further enhances detection with AI-driven technologies and Suspicious Domain Behavior Analysis. These algorithms empower security teams to detect sophisticated threats, such as DNS tunneling, data exfiltration, phishing attempts, and Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs), which often evade traditional defenses.

Let’s take Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) as an example. DGAs are techniques used by malware to generate numerous randomized domain names for purposes such as communicating with command-and-control (C2) servers, making detection challenging for traditional defenses. EfficientIP continuously monitors DNS traffic in real time and applies its patented AI-driven tuple clustering algorithm, which analyzes domain patterns and behaviors to identify domains generated by malware early in their lifecycle, enabling real-time blocking and preventing malicious activity from escalating.

In the screenshot below, you can see a malicious domain flagged by this algorithm that was not detected by traditional solutions, as shown in the VirusTotal score.

This seamless integration of real-time monitoring, AI-driven detection, and proactive blocking ensures that organizations can stay ahead of evolving cyber threats, maintaining a secure and resilient network environment aligned with Zero Trust principles.

DNS-Centric Intelligence and Observability

EfficientIP’s DNS Intelligence Center (DNS IC) and DDI Observability Center (DDI OC) provide detailed, actionable insights into DNS traffic and DDI architecture, ensuring full visibility to support continuous verification and threat investigation, a core Zero Trust principle. The DNS IC strengthens threat detection by matching EfficientIP’s DNS Threat Intelligence with enterprise traffic patterns, analyzing domain behavior for suspicious activity, and accelerating domain investigation using IoCs, risk scoring, and historical data. 

The DDI Observability Center (DDI OC) ensures network performance by monitoring DNS traffic, simplifying troubleshooting, and maintaining service continuity. By quickly identifying and effectively investigating anomalies while ensuring uninterrupted network operations, these tools provide network and security teams with actionable insights on DNS threats and potential breaches. Together, they minimize blind spots, enhance threat detection, and ensure adherence to Zero Trust strategies through ongoing integrity checks across the network.

Patented Adaptive Countermeasures

EfficientIP’s automated response mechanisms mitigate security threats in real time without disrupting business operations. Using dynamic enforcement techniques, organizations can effectively accelerate threat response while maintaining service continuity.
Key countermeasures include:

• Patented Quarantine Mode to isolate suspected attack sources.
• Blocking source IPs to prevent communication with malicious actors who have gained access ensures that threats are contained before they can escalate. 
• Rate limiting DNS traffic per IP to reduce the impact of volumetric attacks.
• Redirecting traffic to a notification page to inform users and control access.
• Forcing DNS responses to disrupt malicious queries with predefined replies.

These measures restrict unauthorized access, accelerate remediation, and minimize operational disruption, ensuring Zero Trust security principles are enforced and threats are effectively contained.

Seamless Integration and Automation with the Ecosystem

A unified security ecosystem is essential for enforcing Zero Trust and enabling effective collaboration between network and security teams. API and Event driven, EfficientIP’s DDI and DNS Security solutions integrate easily with SIEM, SOAR, and NAC platforms for automated security responses, streamlining operations and reducing the time required to resolve security incidents. By automating firewall policy updates (IP, subnet, zones) and enriching security tools with real-time DNS insights, the integration strengthens security posture while minimizing operational overhead.

By enabling real-time synchronizations through event sharing or APIs, these integrations ensure security policies are enforced consistently across all security layers, simplify security workflows, and drive SOC efficiency. According to the latest EMA research on Zero Trust, improved collaboration between network and security teams is key to strengthening an organization’s overall cybersecurity posture, making such integrations critical for modern security strategies.

Conclusion: Use DDI and DNS Security For Your Zero Trust Strategy Implementation

Zero Trust requires a strong, foundational security layer, and EfficientIP’s Zero Trust DNS and DDI solutions provide exactly that. By leveraging holistic visibility, fine-grained DNS filtering and network segmentation, real-time DNS monitoring and threat detection, as well as automated response mechanisms, organizations can establish a proactive security model that enforces continuous verification and least-privilege access. DNS acts as the earliest checkpoint in the security chain, reducing the workload on firewalls and other security components while avoiding latency issues. With Zero Trust DNS and DDI, organizations gain granular access control and consistent, centralized management of security policies enterprise-wide, limiting lateral movement and ensuring a robust, scalable Zero Trust architecture that adapts to evolving security challenges.