Zero Trust Architecture for Ransomware Defence in Virtualised Environment

Dhumal, Atharva Jitendra (2025) Zero Trust Architecture for Ransomware Defence in Virtualised Environment. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

The increased rate of ransomware has also created an urgency to shift the paradigm in regard to cybersecurity to non-perimeter-focused models. This study examined how Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) can restrain the invaders of ransomware with the least privilege host restrictions, micro-segmentation, and continuous monitoring. The main goal is to determine how well the components of ZTA can identify the propagation of ransomware and stop it, even in the controlled virtual testbed. A virtual box-based enterprise network was built up by the use of an Ubuntu victim node and a Kali Linux attacker node. Security stack included open-source tools, i.e., Wazuh, auditd, and UFW, to introduce real-time monitoring, auditing log, and access control. A scripted attack on file systems was applied to emulate ransomware behavior. The evaluation criteria were the detection latency, the impact on files, the utilization of system resources, and the accuracy of the alert. Testing showed that the ZTA system was able to identify ransomware in an average of 5.3 seconds (N=3), with ~20% of files encrypted before alert, and descriptively low false positives. We report descriptive results only. The project provides valuable experience applying ZTA to an enterprise and gives the possibility of repeatability of future courses of research and improvements of the defensive system.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Hamdan, Mosab UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software > Computer Security
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cyber Security
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	15 Jun 2026 13:32
Last Modified:	15 Jun 2026 13:32
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/9352

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