The practitioner’s guide to non‑human identities

That is the staggering amount non‑human identities (NHIs) outnumber human users across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments. The scary truth in today’s world is that you are now responsible for identities you cannot see, and this blindness is increasing exponentially. These constantly expanding invisible entities include service accounts, API keys, managed identities, bots, IoT devices, AI agents and agentic AI systems creating in DevOps pipelines and CD pipelines at rapid speeds.

This is not a new challenge, but it is rapidly gaining momentum. Often, NHIs are increasing faster than traditional identity and access management (IAM) systems and processes can keep up.

This expansion of demand without the systems to meet it creates holes in your identity posture. One large hole is “shadow access” where savvy users self-service their own identity systems. Shadow access is as ominous as it sounds. This unauthorized, unsupervised and often over-permissioned access is a source of major issues. Meanwhile, attackers are leveraging generative AI (gen AI) to exploit weaknesses at a real‑time scale.

If you are looking for full visibility and fine-grained management of your non-human identities, you’ve come to the right place. This guide will walk you through exposing all the hidden risks and help you understand why your machine identities are multiplying faster than your collection of open browser tabs. Let’s get started regaining visibility, control and your sanity. 

Modern ecosystems are built on automation. Virtualization and the clouds often require teams to take advantage of two main concepts for costs savings: ephemerality and elasticity. Ephemeral workloads are short lived, running for days, hours or seconds. But they also run at random locations meaning network addresses change quickly.

This spans your entire application delivery chain from version control, CI/CD, infrastructure management, data, networking, observability and so on. All these bits are moving to elasticity and ephemerality and all of them require NHIs such as open authorization (Oauth2), API keys, IAM/AD roles or privileged accounts to speak to one another.

NHIs become “shadow access” when they create or inherit access paths that are effectively invisible to normal identity governance. In modern cloud and CI/CD environments, identities and permissions for services, automation and tooling are created at high speed. Existing controls are often blind to the resulting access paths, especially when programmatic accounts are overly permissive or poorly governed.

As we’ve mentioned before, research shows that NHIs now vastly outnumber human users in large organizations and that many lack clear ownership and do not go through standardized lifecycle processes. This issue makes them a major source of these lethal identity‑permission combinations that attackers can weaponize as live paths into production environments.

To secure NHIs and help security teams minimize the growing attack surface, practitioners need an operating model tailored to machines, not one that’s been designed for humans, simply retrofitted.

The goal is to join identity management for machine identities and human users into a single plane. We can accomplish this by focusing on the following key items:

• Take a comprehensive inventory of NHIs to understand the scope of potential vulnerabilities.
• Normalize permissions, map access control and security policies to humans, machines and humans working with machines to ultimately create a centralized audit trail for accountability and transparency.
• Improve observability by connecting cloud services, on‑premises, SaaS, DevOps tools, GitHub and others. This will assist in removing uncertainties.

You should implement core security standards across all secrets. To accomplish this, look at some of the following methods:

• Centralize secrets management (keys, tokens, certs and others) with policy enforcement and ensure that least privilege is by default.
• Normalize and enforce short‑lived tokens and automated credential rotation. Find and eliminate secrets in source code and repositories.
• Implement validation steps and reference checks within automated workflows. This method will help proactively prevent unintended breaking changes.

Automating a machine-compliant lifecycle is crucial. Consider the following approaches to achieve it:

• Standardized creation with IAM templates, IAM roles, scoping and ownership tagging.
• Implement automated rescoping of permissions to dynamically adjust access controls as services evolve and tighten privileged access.
• Log all NHIs in a configuration management database (CMDB) at creation to establish traceability and accountability. 
• Ensure guaranteed revocation of access, archive detailed audit trails and cleanup of outstanding credentials.

Embrace real-time analytics to prioritize what matters when it matters. To get started, consider doing:

• Implement real‑time security posture scoring for NHIs across cloud environments and hybrid stacks.
• Immediately trigger remediation playbooks upon detection of misconfigurations, unauthorized access and any suspicious activities (unusual network behavior, user anomalies and consumption of excessive resources).
• Recommend least privilege policies and sequence automated processes safely.

Radically decrease the attack surface by transforming standing privilege into demand‑driven access, let’s explore how:

• Issue short‑lived credentials with multi‑factor authentication (MFA), where feasible (or machine‑equivalent controls).
• Enforce zero trust by granting minimal privilege at request time and log them comprehensively.
• Integrate with apps, microservices and CD pipelines to streamline the developer experience.

1. Find secrets in source code, deposit them in an encrypted secrets management system and start rotating these secrets as soon as possible.
2. Assign metadata such as owners, purpose and intended scope for your top service accounts and managed identities to enforce accountability.
3. Convert long-lived and highly authorized NHIs to just‑in‑time access with least privilege policies.
4. Integrate logging in to CI/CD pipelines and platform tooling to detect unsafe automated processes.
5. Eliminate vague OAuth tokens and IAM policies or narrow their scope.

The rapid spread of NHIs has reshaped your attack surface. However, with a consolidated identity fabric, disciplined secrets management, automated lifecycle management, AI‑assisted posture analytics and just‑in‑time control, you can secure NHIs. This approach also helps you regain visibility and control, and reduces security challenges, all without slowing your developers.

This guide is your roadmap to modern identity management for machines, providing practical guardrails, automated workflows to secure NHIs across any environment. Start with quick wins, instrument for continuous monitoring and make NHIs first‑class citizens of your cybersecurity program. Begin with manageable steps, establish ongoing visibility and prioritize machine identities within your security program.