CUSTOS: Toward Forensic-Ready Zero Trust at the Capture-Containment Boundary

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17068v2
• Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:00:50 GMT
• Title: CUSTOS: Toward Forensic-Ready Zero Trust at the Capture-Containment Boundary
• Abstract summary: CUSTOS is a forensic-ready ZT reference architecture centered on a Forensic Management Point (FMP)<n>An always-on decision record is captured and hash-chained on the gateway at a 1.9-3.0% throughput cost.<n>Results show that forensic-ready ZT requires both an always-on evidentiary floor and bounded reactive capture.
• Score: 1.1458853556386797
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Zero Trust (ZT) replaces implicit trust with continuous verification, but mutual TLS, ephemeral workloads, identity-centric control, and automated remediation reduce payload visibility, weaken IP-based attribution, and shrink the window for acquiring volatile evidence. We propose CUSTOS, a forensic-ready ZT reference architecture centered on a Forensic Management Point (FMP) that coordinates tiered capture, identity- and policy-linked reconstruction, telemetry orchestration, and ZT-controlled investigative access. We evaluate a composed, component-level prototype using a live enforcement gateway plus separate runtime and orchestrator experiments. An always-on decision record is captured and hash-chained on the gateway at a 1.9-3.0\% throughput cost on in-process policy engines, preserving decision provenance outside the monitored workload under stated trust assumptions. Reactive checkpointing (about 65 ms) precedes seconds-scale defender-routed eviction but loses to unsequenced direct SIGKILL (about 9 ms), in-kernel enforcement, and adversarial self-destruction, producing the forensic shredder effect. On a real container, concurrent capture and SIGKILL recovered the planted secret in 0/1000 trials; sequencing SIGKILL behind the FMP barrier recovered it in 1000/1000. The primary integrated single-node Kubernetes race checkpoints an FMP-controlled process; container-memory capture is evaluated separately and was unavailable in the managed-Kubernetes configuration. Across five public benchmark datasets and a synthetic schema reference, identity-oriented telemetry populates 64-75\% of the decision-record schema against 18-30\% for network-oriented, while rate limiting bounds the full-memory admission ceiling. These results show that forensic-ready ZT requires both an always-on evidentiary floor and bounded reactive capture, while identifying where volatile evidence remains unrecoverable.

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