Content delivery network provider Cloudflare Inc. has today announced the development of the Cloudflare Zero Trust SIM, a solution that secures every data packet leaving mobile devices.

The Zero Trust SIM allows organizations to connect employee devices quickly and securely to Cloudflare’s global network, directly integrating devices with Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform to protect their network and employees no matter where they work.

The service is aimed at addressing the issue of securing devices employees use in the age of remote working and bringing their own devices to work. Organizations typically use a secure agent, or application, running on an employee’s device to help secure it.

But Cloudflare argues that although applications and endpoint agents are an important part of the security stack, they can’t secure all traffic across every device and can be challenging to deploy at large scale. Zero Trust SIM fills the gap by securing devices at the SIM level.

Cloudflare Zero Trust SIM integrates seamlessly with Cloudflare’s entire zero-trust security stack, allowing security policies to be enforced for all traffic leaving the device. The Zero Trust SIM allows SIMs to be deployed to iOS and Android devices and locked to a specific device, mitigating the risk of SIM-swapping attacks faced by existing solutions and saving security teams time.

The solution can be deployed at an enterprise scale in minutes using modern eSIM technology, Cloudflare says. Zero Trust SIM can be automatically deployed and enabled using existing Mobile Device Management solutions across all devices within an organization, allowing them to roll out Cloudflare’s Zero Trust SIM without the pain of shipping physical SIM cards.

Cloudflare is also developing new tools, based on the Zero Trust SIM, to provide zero-trust security for the “internet of things,” where more devices connect to the internet, such as vehicles, payment terminals, shipping containers and vending machines.

“When I speak to CISOs, I hear, again and again, that effectively securing mobile devices at scale is one of their biggest headaches, it’s the flaw in everyone’s zero-trust deployment,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cloudflare, said in a statement. “Effectively securing mobile devices is hard, and we have been working on this problem since we launched our WARP mobile app in 2019. Now we plan on going even further.”

In addition to the Zero Trust SIM, Cloudflare announced that it is also launching Zero Trust for Mobile Operators, a new program that will allow carriers to offer their subscribers comprehensive mobile security tools by tapping into Cloudflare’s zero-trust platform. The wireless carrier partner program aims jointly to solve the biggest security and performance challenges of mobile connectivity.

Photo: Brett Jordan/Flickr