Research on zero trust security architecture and continuous authentication mechanism for cloud platform networks

With the rapid development of cloud computing cloud platform networks have become the core infrastructure for enterprises digital business but they face severe security threats such as boundary breakthroughs unauthorized access and data leakage. The traditional perimeter-based security model can no longer adapt to the dynamic and open characteristics of cloud platform networks so this study aims to explore an effective security protection solution by researching zero trust security architecture and continuous authentication mechanism. The research first analyzes the core theory of zero trust security architecture including the principle of never trust always verify micro-segmentation and least privilege as well as key technologies for continuous authentication such as real-time identity verification multi-factor authentication and context-aware authentication. On this basis a layered zero trust security architecture consisting of perception layer control layer application layer and data layer is designed and a continuous authentication mechanism based on multi-dimensional factor fusion is constructed integrating static dynamic and environmental authentication factors. To verify the performance of the proposed scheme comparative experiments are conducted with traditional RBAC scheme and single-factor continuous authentication scheme. The experiments cover three scenarios normal access mild abnormal access and severe abnormal access and also test the performance under different concurrent user scales and network load conditions. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher authentication accuracy in all scenarios reaching 95.8 92.4 and 89.6 in normal mild abnormal and severe abnormal access respectively. It also maintains lower false positive rate and false negative rate with the false positive rate in normal access only 1.1. In terms of authentication delay and CPU occupancy the proposed scheme balances security and performance with a slower growth rate when user scale expands or network load increases. This study provides a reliable security protection solution for cloud platform networks effectively supporting the secure development of enterprise digital business.