Universal Trust

 

Definition

Universal Trust is a security principle that rejects implicit trust across identities, systems, and execution paths, requiring trust to be continuously verified throughout operation rather than granted once and assumed. Universal Trust treats trust as a dynamic, cryptographically verifiable property that must persist across sessions, actions, and execution boundaries.

 

Why It Matters

Most modern security models grant trust at connection or login time and assume it remains valid. Modern attacks exploit this assumption by abusing trusted identities, valid sessions, and authorized access after connection. Universal Trust addresses this failure by requiring trust to be continuously enforced during execution, not just at the point of access.

 

Relationship to UTE and UTTP

Universal Trust is the parent principle behind Universal Trust Enforcement (UTE) and Universal Trust Threat Protection (UTTP). UTE is the execution-time trust enforcement architecture that implements the Universal Trust principle at the protocol layer. UTTP is the threat-prevention model built on UTE that uses execution-time enforcement to prevent post- access attacks such as identity abuse, lateral movement, session replay, and impersonation before exploitation occurs.