Common Challenges for Securing Non-Human Identities

Why Do Non-Human Identities (NHI) Matter?

We all know that non-human identities (NHIs), also known as machine identities or service identities, are a ubiquitous part of any modern organization. They are everywhere and contribute significantly to an organization's speed and agility in the cloud by managing and automating complex workflows.

Non-human identities come in several forms, some managed by central Identity or IAM team, some by distributed application and platform teams. Creation and management of these identities is often left to the developers and managers of an application team, which could quickly lead to security and operational challenges as organizations grow and scale. This blog introduces some of the common challenges when it comes to managing and securing NHI access in modern environments.

Common Challenges

With NHIs outnumbering human users in most organizations — sometimes as high as 20 machine IDs for every 1 human user according to a study by the Cloud Security Alliance — managing these identities can be a large undertaking. Below are some of the most common challenges organizations face when it comes to NHI access management:

Visibility & Governance

Continuous evaluation of how NHI access is evolving and more importantly what actions these identities are performing is critical. These secrets or identities often never get off-boarded, making them increasingly easy to target.

These identities often have access that grants privileges to mission-critical systems, data, and parts of the organization's information catalog that should be better secured.

Fine-Grained Control

API keys, OAuth tokens, and machine identities are common types of NHIs. An organization can benefit from applying least privilege access patterns for these constructs. More often than not, the access requirements and permissions of service principals do not grow or balloon over time, making it safer to apply these principles with more stringent control.

Utilizing an external system to govern and manage this control and provide visibility can be beneficial. The external platform or system can bridge the gaps in knowledge and requirements between distributed application teams and central security and IT teams.

Long-Standing Credentials

NHIs are typically provisioned with long-lived credentials with standing permissions. The lifespan of these identities and the permission assignments often outlive their use.

For instance, an automation that is used to execute a specific task once a week that does not last longer than 30 minutes does not need long-standing permission assignments. Vaulting such credentials could become strenuous to manage and maintain, leading teams to find workarounds and bad habits that could expose sensitive credentials to bad actors.

Looking for ways to secure machine identities in your environment? Check our resources for mitigating the risk of over-privileged NHIs.

How Can Britive Help?

Britive’s Cloud PAM platform is built for ephemeral access and short-lived credentials. Humans and NHIs alike can leverage Britive’s unique permission broker to gain short-lived access and more importantly ephemeral, temporary account and access keys.

Britive can help with the elimination of long-lived service credentials by leveraging workload federation or creating short-lived service principals that can be used by RPAs, pipelines, as well as human identities. Cloud service providers (CSPs) such as GCP or AWS often require the use of service principals for command-line access or to plug into any data evaluation pipelines.

R&D and Platform teams often leverage these service principles to test their hypotheses, exploring data for key indicators or data visualizations—all of which require NHIs to carry higher-level permissions on data and more access across multi-cloud storage and compute solutions. Britive’s SDK and robust command line tooling can help ease developer burden while securing access for modern workloads.