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Home Router as Zero Trust Gateway: A Review of Network Access Models for Secure Work-from-Home
Published Online: July-August 2026
Pages: 113-125
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No DOIAbstract
The growth of work-from-home and hybrid work models has revealed serious weaknesses in traditional VPN-based remote access, which often grants broad network reach after a single authentication. Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) offers a more secure approach, but current deployments mostly rely on cloud gateways or application proxies and rarely treat the home router as a first-class enforcement point. This review surveys main remote access models for secure work-from-home—full-tunnel VPN, split tunneling, application-centric ZTNA, and secure SD-WAN/SASE—and examines emerging approaches that embed Zero Trust features into home routers and gateways. It identifies a clear gap in systematically using the home router as a Zero Trust gateway to enforce identity-aware, device-aware, and least-privilege access at the edge of the home network. The paper argues that router-based Zero Trust gateways can reduce implicit trust in home LANs, limit lateral movement, and offer a practical path to securing remote work, while outlining key design considerations and future research directions for this underexplored architecture.
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