How Verifiable Credentials are critical to your Zero-Trust strategy

Zero Trust and Verifiable Credentials are two methods of making online interactions as safe as possible for the end user, and they complement each other well. Here, we’ll take a look at how they can work together to provide the highest level of security and trust online.

Why everyone talks about Zero Trust

Historically, firewalls created the security perimeter for companies and organizations. Everything outside the perimeter is unsafe; everything inside can be trusted. Unfortunately, as soon as an employee interacts with an outside file, which is often necessary to do their job, they have, in effect, opened the firewall and put their entire company’s network at risk. If you ask any security professional today, most will tell you that they’ve known that this was a problem for years, and that we have long needed a better way to protect networks than building ever bigger, taller, perimeter defenses.

That better way is Zero Trust, which is now the dominant paradigm for cybersecurity. It means treating everything as a potential threat, whether inside or outside the network, and acting appropriately. This means continuous verification for access to every network asset and restricting access to resources to only those who need them (rather than treating the company network as an open landscape where every employee has access to everything). Summed up by the phrase, “never trust, always verify,” Zero Trust originated in the work of analyst John Kindervag, who, in 2004, saw the (now obvious) problem of trusting the firewall to keep bad actors out and what happened when they (inevitably) got inside.

The futility of perimeter thinking in the face of cybercrime has driven the Zero Trust approach to the forefront of cybersecurity. The global cybercrime economy is estimated to be about 10.5 trillion dollars, representing the world's third largest GDP, right behind the US and China. It affects everyone, even billion-dollar enterprises, because every person is a potential point of failure that bad actors can use to gain access to sensitive information. As Dr. Chase Cunningham put it in a recent Meetup with Indicio, “It's not about money, it’s not about the tech, it's about smart approaches to the problem.”

Verifiable Credentials solve the last problem for Zero Trust: Identity

Once you have a Zero Trust Architecture in place, most of your enterprise network will not be “connected” in the traditional sense. This ensures that if someone gains access to one database, they don’t gain access to every database. Every employee will need to log in to each program or system they want to interact with individually, which leaves just one last thing that ties all these systems together: the employee’s identity.

This employee’s identity becomes one of the single biggest threats to your organization, which is why most organizations will limit access to only those who are absolutely necessary. However, some employees need access to everything or almost everything, think your C-suite, VPs, or directors. Even one of these people being hacked could be catastrophic.

So, to complete your Zero Trust solution, the final piece of the puzzle is a strong digital identity and authentication system. There is no stronger way to manage digital identity than by using Verifiable Credentials.

Decentralized Identity and Verifiable Credentials

A Verifiable Credential enables a person, an organization, or even a device to cryptographically prove their or its identity in a way that avoids the need for passwords and logins, and the risk of them being phished. Think of a Verifiable Credential as a digital wrapper that can seal any information so that when it is presented, you always know the original source of the credential and know that the information inside hasn’t been altered. This allows people to hold their identity data securely in a digital wallet, and companies to avoid the entire architecture of user accounts and centralized databases, whether their own or those of a third party identity provider.

Instead, a company can issue a Verifiable Credential to an employee and then instantly verify that credential when it is presented by that employee. The credential is bound to the employee through biometric access to their device and digital wallet, and even through comparing a live biometric scan with a biometric template in the credential (something that could help deter deepfake phishing). Least privilege access rules can be embedded in the credential and the verifier software.

This all makes authentication seamless, and enables the continuous verification and least privileged access required by zero trust simple to execute. And your employees will never have to come up with new passwords ever again (at least for work access).

The best part is that it’s really easy and really quick to integrate Verifiable Credentials into existing identity and access management systems. You don’t need to spend time and effort ripping and replacing; you can start making use of a more secure digital identity today.

To learn more about these two systems and how they interact, we highly recommend watching the recent Indicio Meetup featuring Dr. Chase Cunningham, “Dr Zero Trust”, Cyber Security Expert and Author, and Will Groah, a member of the Indicio Board of Directors.

To learn more about Verifiable Credentials, you can visit Indicio’s website to learn more about our complete solution Indicio Proven®, or reach out to speak with one of our industry-leading experts to discuss a specific use case or idea.

Copyright 2025 Indicio PBC