The zero-trust paradox: Why systems built to eliminate trust may be destroying it

There is a phrase I have used in dozens of security briefings over the past decade, delivered to boards, to engineering teams, to skeptical CFOs trying to understand why we needed to rebuild our entire network architecture: “Never trust, always verify.” It is clean, logical and sounds like exactly the kind of discipline that organizations need. Zero trust, as a security model, emerged from a reasonable observation: The old perimeter-based model was brok