Tools / Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) Interview questions
How does Zero Trust handle east-west traffic differently from north-south traffic?
North-south traffic, entering from external clients toward internal systems, has traditionally received the most scrutiny, since it crosses the perimeter firewall. East-west traffic, communication between internal servers or services, was historically assumed safe simply because it never left the network.
Zero Trust removes that asymmetry. It applies the same identity verification and encryption, typically mTLS enforced via a service mesh or microsegmentation controller, to east-west flows as it does to north-south ones, since a compromised internal system attacking another internal system is treated as just as real a threat as an external attacker.
In practice this means internal API calls between microservices go through the same kind of authorization checks that an external user's request to the API gateway would.
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