A Study on the Application of Zero Trust Architecture to Anti-Money Laundering Systems
Anti-Money Laundering (AML) systems serve as critical compliance infrastructure for financial institutions to detect and prevent illegal fund laundering. Howeve...
A Study on the Application of Zero Trust Architecture to Anti-Money Laundering Systems
Anti-Money Laundering (AML) systems serve as critical compliance infrastructure for financial institutions to detect and prevent illegal fund laundering. However, AML systems are constantly exposed to sophisticated cyber threats, including insider threats, unauthorized access, and data breaches, due to the nature of processing vast amounts of customer financial data and suspicious transaction information. Traditional perimeter-based security models have shown limitations in responding to environmental changes such as cloud migration, the spread of remote work, and the introduction of microservice architecture.
Although most public institutions and enterprises have established and utilized the traditional "Zone-based" security model for their information systems, various forms of security incidents continue to occur and are, in fact, on the rise. One major cause is the increase in malicious attackers, driven by the overall advancement of hacking techniques due to the emergence of AI, as well as the ease of information access that allows anyone to easily encounter cyberattack methods and knowledge. Ultimately, this demonstrates that the existing security model has reached its limits in strengthening cybersecurity.
In response, federal agencies in the United States are faithfully implementing Zero Trust deployment and requirements driven by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under the Presidential Policy Directive. Meanwhile, the South Korean government released the Zero Trust Guideline 1.0 in 2023, followed by the Zero Trust Guideline 2.0 in November 2024, and is actively working to secure deployment cases through pilot projects.
As the Zero Trust security model is set to establish itself across critical industries, the time to seek application methods for AML systems is fast approaching. Therefore, this study explores approaches to applying the Zero Trust security model to AML systems and proposes a realizable security architecture for them. In addition, to align the detailed security control items of the Zero Trust Guideline with the core elements of Zero Trust, this study reclassified the detailed criteria and verified the feasibility of these reclassified criteria by function using the Delphi method.