Securing non-human identities requires specific practices that address their unique characteristics. Unmanaged non-human identities create specific, exploitable vulnerabilities that attackers actively target. AI agents compound this problem, as they often require broad permissions across multiple systems to perform their automated tasks, creating additional NHIs that persist independently of any human oversight. AI agents often request expansive permissions because they need flexibility to accomplish varied tasks. Unlike traditional automation that follows predefined rules, AI agents make dynamic decisions about which systems to access and what actions to take. A company with 5,000 employees might have 50, ,000 active non-human identities spread across SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure, and integration platforms.
These accounts often lack ownership or lifecycle governance, and the result is a broad, often invisible attack surface. Unlike humans, these identities typically have persistent, high-level access to systems and data without the same visibility, controls or safeguards. Authentication is programmatic rather than interactive, and operations run around the clock with no concept of “normal hours.” A single NHI can scale from one instance to thousands in seconds.
Governance of NHIs must include secret creation tracking to ensure every secret is traceable to its origin, securely distributed, and linked to a legitimate identity. This ephemeral nature dramatically reduces the attack surface and aligns with modern security practices, ensuring access credentials are dynamic, tightly controlled, and far less prone to long-term abuse. This expansion is complex and often unmanaged and fragmented, which impacts IT and security leaders in several ways.
The foundation: build a certifiable inventory
- Most organisations have a strategy for managing human access — onboarding, SSO, role-based permissions, and multi-factor authentication.
- This holistic approach of securing the NHI Lifecycle can sound daunting, given the scale of cloud deployments, but it’s exactly where the industry is heading.
- Instead of using separate controls for each kind of identity, the primary difference between human and nonhuman ID management might be the scale at which those controls are applied.
- Organizations should securely store tokens, rotate them regularly, and use encryption to prevent unauthorized access.
- This has led to an exponential increase in NHIs, hyper-fragmentation, making it very hard to implement controls over this very complex landscape.
As organizations expand their digital infrastructure, the number of these identities can grow into the thousands, and many may remain unnoticed or unmanaged. These special-purpose accounts are used by applications and services to perform automated tasks such as database updates, file transfers, or system https://www.recycle100.info/the-essential-laws-of-explained-23/ backups. Prompt offboarding helps prevent former employees or third parties from retaining access to sensitive systems or data.
These policies should be designed to enforce security best practices, such as regular vaulting, credential rotation, applying and monitoring for anomalous behaviors. Finally, applying consistent access policies across all non-human identities is essential. These platforms offer tools for automating the secure management of non-human identities, including provisioning, de-provisioning, and enforcing security policies across the board. This system becomes the bedrock for understanding the scope and nature of non-human identities, enabling precise monitoring and management. Achieving visibility and control over non-human identities involves a strategic approach.
Core Challenges in Managing Non-Human Identities
The integration that required the OAuth token was replaced by a different tool. No single pane of glass exists across SaaS applications, cloud infrastructure, and on-premises systems to show all active non-human identities. Understanding what are non-human identities is only the first step. An AI agent might discover and exploit access paths that human developers never anticipated. RPA bots, CI/CD pipelines, and workflow automation tools have operated as non-human identities for years. Certificate-based authentication provides strong security when properly managed but creates operational challenges around rotation and expiration.
- The operational pressure to deliver features quickly results in service accounts and OAuth apps receiving broader permissions than required.
- They generate an attack surface many times greater than your human workforce, are not subject to the security precautions in place for people, and allow attackers to have similar or greater access to sensitive data and systems.
- You cannot hire a few key SMEs/Consultants to quickly fix this—for many large global organisations, this could be at least a 2-3 year program and upwards of a $10-20M investment, based on my experience running some of the largest NHI programs in the industry.
- When Jane is employed by your organization as a software engineer, HR provisions her account, assigns role-based permissions, and connects it all to her employee record.
In modern enterprise IT environments, non-human identities (NHIs) such as service accounts, application tokens, CI/CD tools, APIs, bots, and other automated processes often outnumber human users, sometimes by 46 to 1. Managing NHIs at scale requires complete visibility into where secrets are stored, how they’re used, and who (or what) has access to them. Supply chain attacks—such as injecting malicious code into trusted dependencies—are becoming more frequent. Without strict governance, these accounts can accumulate excessive permissions, increasing the risk of privilege escalation attacks. These identities are common practice for cloud and DevOps environments, but when mismanaged, they create security gaps. This approach not only enhances security but also simplifies identity management and ensures robust protection against evolving threats.
- However, if these identities are overlooked or poorly managed, they can create significant vulnerabilities that may result in expensive security breaches.
- Without strict governance, these accounts can accumulate excessive permissions, increasing the risk of privilege escalation attacks.
- Gartner defines machine identity management as the systematic process of securely managing and protecting these digital identities, especially for servers, applications, and network devices.
- Sisense Breach – In April 2024, Sisense reported a security breach from unauthorized access to Sisense’s self-managed GitLab instance, which led to the exfiltration of large amounts of data, including access tokens, API keys, passwords, and certificates.
- Weak or shared credentials, overprovisioned permissions, and poor management practices increase the risk of breaches and unauthorized access.
First is that misconfigured or over-privileged secrets can inadvertently grant access to sensitive data or critical systems, significantly increasing the attack surface. However, we most likely want these systems to communicate securely, only authorizing specific identities under specific circumstances. If we want them to communicate with the entire world, that is easy, as we simply point to the other non-human identities and programmatically describe how they should interact.
The Hidden Security Risks of Non-Human Identities
Understanding what are non-human identities is the first step toward securing the hidden layer between your SaaS applications. Service accounts receive elevated permissions only when needed for specific tasks, then permissions are automatically revoked. Automated discovery tools continuously scan environments to identify new NHIs as they’re created. Static inventories tell you what non-human identities exist at a point in time. Missing rate limiting on API keys enables data exfiltration at scale. An API key that needs read access to a single database table instead has write access to the entire database.
These identities include service accounts, workload identities, API tokens, automation scripts and increasingly AI agents. DevOps tools rely on non-human identities to build, test, and deploy applications and function securely. It takes an average of 258 days to identify and contain a data breach—that’s more than eight months of dangerous exposure. Whether you’re managing human identities with stringent access controls or securing non-human identities with automated workflows, CheckRed ensures proactive defense against https://ativanx.com/2021/11/03/upstream-appoints-george-kalyvas-as-chief-commercial-officer-to-oversee-market-growth-acceleration/ identity-related risks.
Business users authorize OAuth apps with all available scopes to ensure functionality. The operational pressure to deliver features quickly results in service accounts and OAuth apps receiving broader permissions than required. The SaaS supply chain extends your attack surface to include every third-party integration. Many organizations discover months later that former vendors still have active integrations.