These issues can lead to persistent attack surfaces, credential compromise, and unauthorized access if not proactively managed across the software development lifecycle. The last decade has seen an explosion of NHIs in the enterprise, driven by the rise in cloud computing, increasing reliance on third-party services via APIs, and the development of machine learning models and their agents. They provide the raw telemetry that security teams depend on to identify suspicious behavior, build detection rules and reconstruct attacker activity after an
This ensures attackers cannot exploit https://www.mon-expression.info/if-you-read-one-article-about-read-this-one-11/ defunct NHI secrets to gain a foothold in your environment. By identifying all the NHIs and knowing when they were created, we can also predict when they need to be rotated. If credentials are left to live for months or years, or in the worst case, forever, NHI secrets exposure or compromise becomes increasingly likely.
Separation of duties—that is, ensuring that the party carrying out a task is not the same party responsible for approving the task—is especially important for AI agents. Because traditional identity security platforms and practices are often designed with human users in mind, NHI management requires that security teams take a slightly different approach. AI agents and large language models (LLMs) can also change their behaviors in ways that other software can’t—which brings its own security problems.
Core Challenges in Managing Non-Human Identities
Most organisations treat human identities and non-human identities as part of the same access management strategy. NHI management is also critical for protecting high-value operations, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) workflows and AI agents, which often handle sensitive financial or provisioning tasks. Properly managed NHIs ensure only authorized entities, whether bots, services, or automation tools, can access systems and data, and precisely define the tasks these entities are permitted to perform. Standardizing these processes across both types of identities reduces complexity and ensures consistency across both operations and security. This underscores the need for a unified security approach that encompasses both human and non-human identities to ensure comprehensive protection. Proactive management ensures that audit trails are clear and accessible when required.
Human Identities vs Non-Human Identities
We are going to continue innovating to help enterprises focus on solving this issue at scale, with automation and the lowest false positive rates of any detection tool. This distinction is critical because conventional IAM tools designed for human users fail to address the scale and lifecycle management requirements of machine identities, which can outnumber human identities by 100 to 1 in modern enterprises. The NHI Top 10 recognizes that non-human identities operate autonomously, often without human intervention, creating unique attack vectors like improper offboarding and long-lived secrets that persist indefinitely. A Universal Identity Graph maps all relationships between human identities, non-human identities, and resources they access. Understanding where you stand on this maturity spectrum helps identify immediate priorities and long-term goals.
Yet another new attack surface tests you
Security breaches are increasingly expensive and harder to spot, extending beyond common attacks like phishing. This comprehensive solution is designed to manage and secure both human and non-human identities across diverse cloud environments. In contrast, non-human identities operate autonomously, often with decentralized management and unique security challenges such as hardcoded credentials and limited visibility. In complex cloud environments, each application, service, or process might require its own NHI. Even in large organizations, the number of employees and https://www.socialwebguide.org/what-are-safe-data-sharing-practices-online/ users remains manageable.
- Once you clearly understand which services are actively being called, it becomes much easier to ensure that regular updates are being delivered, especially for third-party systems interacting with mission-critical data.
- These findings align with the view we have held for many years, that this is probably the hardest security challenge organisations will face, given that it has become the number one identity security risk in the industry.
- When an employee who authorized OAuth applications departs, review and revoke those authorizations if they’re no longer needed.
- Organizations must ensure transparency and accountability in their data processing activities, regardless of whether the data pertains to human or non-human identities.
Under a zero trust model, NHIs are granted only the minimum permissions required for each task. Every action that a service, workload, bot or agent takes must therefore be constrained by explicit technical controls. Vaults give IT and security teams a secure place to store NHI credentials, and they often support ephemeral credentials, just-in-time access and automated rotation. What if the agent’s choice fell far outside the foreseeable results of the user’s prompt? The trouble is that, as mentioned previously, the same IAM tools used to help ensure that humans comply with these rules cannot always be smoothly applied to NHIs.
Why Non-Human Identities Matter in Cybersecurity
When an employee who authorized OAuth applications departs, review and revoke those authorizations if they’re no longer needed. Security teams need approaches that account for persistent access, lack of MFA, and behavioral complexity. The gap is that non-human identities operate fundamentally differently than human identities, requiring different security approaches.
Why Attackers Target Machine Credentials
NHIs enable machines and software workloads to securely authenticate, operate and perform tasks automatically (including access other machines, processes or services) without direct human interaction. Megan is an SEO content writer focused on making complex, fast-moving ideas easier to understand. The organisations that get this right won’t just reduce risk — they’ll create a more resilient, future-ready identity ecosystem. From machine learning pipelines to infrastructure as code, NHIs power the automation that businesses rely on to move faster, scale smarter, and operate globally. Some researchers have already started referring to them as virtual employees, highlighting the shift from task execution to autonomous participation. The emergence of agentic AI is pushing the boundaries of identity even further.
The OWASP NHI Top 10 focuses on risks unique to non-human identities (NHIs), such as machine-to-machine authentication, improper offboarding, and long-lived secrets. Being able to identify when a key is used by an NHI on an approved “allow list” is key to detecting and reacting to breaches. While that is scary to ponder, the reality is that for the majority of our machine identities, they do not care who is using the key, they just grant the entity access based on possessing the credential. If an unknown person showed up on your doorstep and had a key to your house, would you automatically let them in?
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. Understanding NHI authentication methods is critical because machine credentials typically lack multi-factor authentication and rely heavily on secure key storage and rotation. That very same application would (presumably) now have dozens of microservices, and each microservice would require credentials to call other services’ API, access databases, and authenticate to message queues. A software bot automatically processes an invoice by logging into an ERP system and authenticates with its own credentials established to authenticate. Smart thermostats and industrial sensors are examples of devices that utilize IoT device credentials to securely transfer data back to a backend. For that application to authenticate with a connected database, it will authenticate as a service account using database credentials.