Zero Trust Engineer

Uses the account settings pages you already have. Nothing to install. You will likely also improve your own security materially, which is a decent side effect.

1. 1

   Find the account that owns all the others

   Start at your main email. Now list every service that would send a password reset there. That is not a list of accounts — it is a list of things someone gets for free the moment they take that one. Security people call this blast radius, and it is the single most useful concept in identity work.

2. 2

   Check what is actually guarding it

   Look at the security settings of that email account. Is there a second factor? Is it SMS — which is interceptable — or an app or hardware key? Now check the recovery options: an old phone number or a disused backup address is a back door that bypasses everything else you just checked.

3. 3

   Review what you have handed out

   Find the third-party access page on your Google, Microsoft or Apple account — the list of apps you signed in to using it. Most people have twenty to eighty entries and recognise perhaps half. Read what each was granted. Some will have read access to your entire mailbox from a service you used once in 2019.

   Any

   Google:    myaccount.google.com/permissions

   Any

   Microsoft: account.microsoft.com/privacy → apps and services

   Any

   Apple:     appleid.apple.com → Sign in with Apple

4. 4

   Revoke, and notice how that feels

   Remove everything you do not currently use. Notice the hesitation — "what if something breaks?" That exact hesitation, multiplied across ten thousand employees and twenty years, is why organisations accumulate permissions nobody dares remove. You are feeling the central problem of identity engineering firsthand.

5. 5

   Check the sessions still open

   Most services list active sessions and signed-in devices. Look for a device you no longer own or a location you do not recognise. Sign them all out. Note how many services do not offer this at all — that absence is itself a finding.

6. 6

   Write the one-page assessment

   What is your most valuable account? What is the weakest path into it — is it the password, the second factor, the recovery method, or an app you granted access to years ago? What would you fix first if you had one hour? That prioritised write-up is exactly the deliverable an identity or GRC role produces, and doing it for yourself is the cheapest possible practice.

Paper and a pen. Deliberately no tools — the constraint is the point, because architecture is thinking, not diagramming software.

1. 1

   Draw what you actually have

   Your home network, on one sheet. Router, every device, how each connects. If you did the exposure trial you already have the inventory; if not, list them from memory and then check — the gap between what you remembered and what is really there is itself the first finding, and it is the same gap every organisation has.

2. 2

   Draw the lines nothing crosses

   Now mark what can reach what. On a normal home network the honest answer is everything reaches everything — your work laptop, your smart bulb, a guest's phone, the doorbell camera all sit in one flat space. Draw that reality, not the reality you would prefer.

3. 3

   Name the thing that actually matters

   Of everything on that page, what would genuinely hurt to lose or have taken? Usually one or two things: the machine with your work on it, the drive with the family photos. Circle them. Everything else on the diagram exists, in security terms, mainly as a route toward those.

4. 4

   Pick the worst device and follow it

   Choose the least trustworthy thing on the network — the cheapest smart device, the one that has not had a firmware update in three years. Trace, on the diagram, exactly what it can reach if someone takes it. That path is your blast radius, and drawing it is more persuasive than any risk score you could write down.

5. 5

   Redesign it, on a second sheet

   Draw the version where that cannot happen. A separate network for untrusted devices. The important machine somewhere the doorbell cannot reach. Guest access that is genuinely separate. You do not have to build it — you have to be able to justify it.

6. 6

   Now write down what your design costs

   This is the step that separates architecture from wishful thinking. What breaks? Casting to the TV probably stops working. Someone has to maintain two networks. A guest cannot print. Write the honest list, then decide which trade-offs you would actually accept and which you would not. If you cannot articulate the cost of your own design, you will lose every real architecture argument you ever have.