A Systematic Review and Cross-Domain Taxonomy of Emerging Cybersecurity Threats and Zero-Trust-Based Defence Architectures

1. We develop a structured taxonomy of emerging cybersecurity attack vectors covering network and infrastructure attacks, IoT and next-generation communication threats, application and physical-layer attacks, and AI-enabled attack vectors.
2. We analyze existing studies using common criteria, including attack domain, methodology, evaluation environment, security mechanism, major findings, and reported limitations, enabling a consistent comparison across heterogeneous research areas.
3. We investigate how Zero Trust principles, including explicit authentication, least-privilege authorization, continuous monitoring, and dynamic policy enforcement, can complement modern attack detection and mitigation mechanisms.
4. We identify major research gaps and propose a conceptual adaptive cross-domain Zero Trust defence framework that connects attack detection, risk assessment, policy enforcement, decentralized trust, privacy-aware learning, and continuous security feedback.