Non-human identities (NHIs) have emerged as a critical component of modern cloud environments. From API keys and CI/CD pipelines to service accounts and other automated processes, NHIs are indispensable for enabling innovation, automation, and scale.
However, as demonstrated by the number of high-profile attacks exploiting these machine identities, they are a security challenge that organizations can no longer ignore.
Understanding the Rise of Non-Human Identities (NHIs)
NHIs play a central role in today’s cloud ecosystems, automating tasks and ensuring seamless integration across systems. Unlike human identities, NHIs represent digital entities — API keys, service accounts, tokens, and automation scripts — that interact with applications, data, and services without direct human intervention.
What makes NHIs particularly unique is their sheer volume: in many modern cloud infrastructures, NHIs often outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x. This exponential growth poses new challenges for identity and access management, especially as NHIs are often:
- Over-provisioned: NHIs are frequently assigned standing, high-level access for convenience, creating vulnerabilities.
- Lacking consistent lifecycle management: Without a defined process for creation, usage, and decommissioning, NHIs can become stale and pose risks.
- Under-monitored: Security teams often struggle to gain visibility into what these identities are doing or how they are being used.
The Growing Attack Surface: Lessons from Industry Incidents
Recent high-profile breaches have brought NHI security into sharp focus. For example, the U.S. Department of Treasury experienced a breach where attackers exploited a vulnerable API key to gain unauthorized access. Such incidents illustrate how poorly managed NHIs can serve as entry points for attackers, enabling privilege escalation, lateral movement, and data exfiltration.
Common attack vectors targeting NHIs include:
- Credential leakage: API keys and tokens hard coded into source code or stored in public repositories are easy targets for attackers.
- Over-privileged NHIs: Statically provisioned NHIs with excessive access become high-value targets for malicious actors.
- Lack of monitoring: Without visibility into NHI behavior, organizations struggle to detect misuse or anomalies.
Building a Comprehensive NHI Security Strategy
Organizations need a strategic approach that addresses immediate security needs while preparing for future challenges. Here's how to build a robust and adaptable NHI security program:
Discovery, Assessment, and Prioritization
The first step is identifying and cataloging all NHIs across cloud and hybrid environments. This provides visibility into the scope of the potential risk and helps prioritize high-risk, critical NHIs for immediate security remediation.
Implementing AI-driven tools for continuous discovery and assessment and advanced monitoring can provide additional, ongoing visibility into these identities and their performance.
Governance Policies and Control
By defining clear policies for NHI lifecycle management, usage, and decommissioning security and identity teams can enforce better access control and accountability. Implementing zero standing privileges (ZSP) and aligning with the principles of Zero Trust within these policies also mitigates risk associated with static access.
Dynamic Access Management
Replacing standing privileges with just-in-time (JIT) access controls significantly reduces the risk exposure of NHIs without disrupting their existing workflows. Ephemeral, time-bound access ensures that NHIs have permissions only when they need them, reducing the window of time that permissions can be exploited.
Aligning access provisioning with the principle of least privilege ensures that access is appropriate for the task required, reducing the risk of exploiting over-privileged accounts.
Compliance and Risk Management
Comprehensive audit trails are critical to prove regulatory compliance. Automated reporting capabilities track identity usage both for maintenance and troubleshooting, as well as maintaining preparedness for audits to compliance requirements.
Continuous Improvement
Security controls and policies should be regularly assessed to verify effectiveness, alignment with regulatory requirements, and according to any changes to organizational requirements. As tools and processes change according to the environment, identity strategies for both human and non-humans should adapt accordingly.
NHIs are enablers of both innovation and a growing source of security risk. As the number of NHIs continues to rise, organizations must adopt dynamic, scalable strategies to secure these identities without compromising business agility.
By implementing a comprehensive security strategy that addresses both high priority, immediate needs and future challenges, organizations can better protect their modern cloud environments from emerging threats while supporting rapid innovation and growth.
To learn more about securing NHIs and building a robust identity security strategy, visit schedule a demo with a member of the Britive team or explore community resources such as the Non-Human Identity Management Group.
Britive Team
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