A Study on the Factors Affecting the Intention to Use Zero Trust-based Security Architecture for Remote Work Using Personal Devices YUN, HYE-JOUNG Department of IT Policy and Management Graduate School of Soongsil University Zero Trust is a new securi...
A Study on the Factors Affecting the Intention to Use Zero Trust-based Security Architecture for Remote Work Using Personal Devices YUN, HYE-JOUNG Department of IT Policy and Management Graduate School of Soongsil University Zero Trust is a new security paradigm called ‘Never Trust, Always Verify’, which emerged to overcome the limitations of perimeter-based security. The U.S. federal government experienced a large-scale personal information leakage incident under perimeter-based security, and began zero trust security in 2020 to fundamentally solve the problem. Zero trust denies the concept of a ‘trusted network’ itself, does not fundamentally trust all users, connected devices, and network traffic, and requires constant verification of trust even after authentication. Much research on zero trust security began before and after the announcement of the U.S. federal government's Zero Trust Guide in 2020, but there is still a lack of empirical cases or research cases. The worldwide-spread corona pandemic changed into a corona endemic in 2023, but these days it is easy to see cases that the remote work that became familiar during the corona period is operated entirely or partially. However, organizations are not sufficiently prepared for the remote work environment, and the majority of individuals work remotely using personal devices not provided by the company. This unprepared and uncontrolled remote work environment always poses the possibility of becoming a target for hacking or security incidents. Zero trust security makes companies strengthen security by verifying and authenticating all users and devices accessing the network without trusting them. From this background, this study examines the need to use zero-trust-based security architecture for remote work using personal devices, and utilizes the TOE framework and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model to study the impact of this architecture on users' intention to use it. The correlation between factors was analyzed. Through literature review, self-efficacy, ubiquity, and job autonomy were derived as characteristics of remote work using personal devices, professionalism, compatibility, and security were derived as zero trust security characteristics, and investment will and management support were derived as organizational characteristics, respectively, and they are independent variables of this thesis. In addition, the independent variables of the integrated technology acceptance model, such as performance expectation, effort expectation, social influence, and promotion conditions, are mediating variables of this thesis. In order to confirm the moderation effect that affects the intention to use zero trust-based security architecture for remote work using personal devices, age, public/private, organizational size, and organizational location (metropolitan area, non-metropolitan area) were composed as moderating variables. The survey was conducted on office workers with remote work experience, and as a result of the empirical analysis, 18 hypotheses out of a total of 26 (excluding moderation effects) were adopted. Among the characteristics of remote work using personal devices, self-efficacy and ubiquity had a significant impact on effort expectations, social influence, and facilitating conditions. Job autonomy had a significant effect on facilitating conditions, but had no effect on effort expectations and social influence. Among the zero trust security characteristics, security and professionalism had a significant impact on performance expectations and social influence, but had no effect on promotion conditions, and compatibility had a significant impact on social impact and promotion conditions, but had no effect on performance expectations. In terms of organizational characteristics, willingness to invest had a significant effect on effort expectations, but had no effect on performance expectations. On the other hand, support from management had a significant effect on performance expectations, but had no effect on effort expectations. In this study, it was confirmed that performance expectations, social influence, and facilitating conditions had a positive effect on intention to use, but effort expectations did not have a significant effect on intention to use. In the moderation effect analysis, it was confirmed that there was a moderation effect in age and organizational size. The academic implications of this study include that it proposed zero trust architecture for a remote work environment using personal devices, that zero trust security research was conducted considering the characteristics of personal devices, and that the UTAUT model was applied to zero trust security to determine correlations of variables. Practical implications include suggesting a method of using different verification methods depending on the access request of the devices when requesting access to an internal system through a personal device in a remote work environment, that zero trust security can be applied to other areas by expanding remote work cases, and that the empirical results and control effect analysis results can be effectively applied to the real environment. After this study, it is expected that follow-up research will be conducted to increase job autonomy while increasing security in order to improve work productivity in a remote work environment. The proportion of personal terminal use cases during remote work is more than 80%, indicating that a large number of remote workers use personal devices. As it is being used widely, it seems that national interest and support for remote work environment security at the government level is needed.