An Application Chamber is a software-defined, application-scale perimeter that can be deployed to application servers or user machines to enforce network access policies that are defined by the administrator.  They are an extremely powerful tool in the cybersecurity practitioner's arsenal, enabling bi-directional control over attack propagation into or out of those servers.

Application Chamber Use Cases

Some of the use cases of an Application Chamber include:

Application Segmentation

An Application Chamber can virtually cloak a collection of application servers from the rest of the network, maintaining a set of prescribed network communication paths while blocking other communications, including potential attacks, which may come from the rest of the network, including insider threats.

Blocking Malware Injection 

An Application Chamber can be applied to a server which is terminating a ZTNA access.  This has the effect of blocking communications out of the Application Chamber, limiting the potential scope of the user's access. If, for example, an authorized user with malicious intent attempted to abuse a ZTNA landing server to to inject malware into the network, the Application Chamber could protect the network by blocking that user's egress from the landing server.

Data Leak Prevention 

Another way an Application Chamber can protect the enterprise is by blocking outbound communications to unauthorized destinations. For example, a software developer's VM may be placed in an Application Chamber that blocks its access to the Internet. This would prevent a malicious insider from uploading corporate IP such as source code to Internet destinations. The Application Chamber could also restrict access from that VM to specific, secure DNS resolvers to block leak paths such as DNS tunneling.

Application Cybershield

The combination of an Application Chamber and ZTNA enables the concept of an application cybershield, a perimeter that drops around a critical business application to lock its behavior in place. An application cybershield leverages the Application Chamber's Learn functions to identify known good accesses, and leverages ZTNA to create least-privilege policies to support them. In such a way, IT administrators can quickly harden a critical application server against attacks such as ransomware, to ensure business continuity even in the face of an active cyber attack.

Application Chamber Requirements

Application Chambers are configured in the zCenter orchestrator, and constructed by Zentera Air's zLink agent or Micro-Segmentation Gatekeepers.