Types of Non-Human Identities in Organizations 2025 Guide

A directory service is a database containing information about users, devices, and resources. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a series of tools and practices that help companies recognize and prevent data exposure by controlling the flow of… In today’s ever-evolving threat landscape, businesses must remain vigilant in defending their networks against potential attacks.

Despite their critical role in operations, non-human identities often lack the governance, visibility, and access controls routinely applied to human users. Yet, fewer than 5% of permissions granted to non-human identities are ever used. Organizations now manage an average of 82 machine identities for every employee. Managing these identities ensures that machine-to-machine interactions are trustworthy, eliminating vulnerabilities that attackers might exploit. Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) refers to the discipline of identifying, managing, and securing the identities of non-human entities, such as applications, containers, microservices, and devices. Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) emerges as a solution to ensure the secure lifecycle of these identities, mitigating risks and enhancing operational efficiency.

Effective management of human and non-human identities requires coordinated use of IAM, IGA, secrets management, and machine identity security solutions. Centralized management ensures consistency, visibility, and faster detection of misuse across https://link-building-service.info/invest-smarter-personalized-advice-for-you.html all machine identities. Integrating AI-driven anomaly detection and detailed audit logging ensures rapid response to potential threats and improves visibility across machine-to-machine interactions.

• 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.
• Our eBook “Key Considerations for Securing Different Types of Non-human Identities” walks you through best practices for securing secrets in each of these categories.
• In the past year, 46 per cent of organisations confirmed non-human identity–related breaches.
• Natoma automatically discovers NHIs across your ecosystem and surfaces intelligent context regarding ownership, downstream dependencies, and permissions.
• 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.

These automation platforms allow business users to build integrations without IT involvement, spawning new non-human identities on demand. Meanwhile, non-human identities quietly accumulate elevated privileges, persist long after their original purpose ends, and create invisible attack paths that bypass every human-focused control. Identity and Access Management (IAM) teams dedicate resources to onboarding, role changes, and offboarding for employees. Incidents like Salesloft-Drift demonstrated how compromised non-human identities enabled attackers to escalate privileges and ride trusted connections across hundreds of downstream organizations.

Scale and complexity

Stale / Inactive Accounts – Due to weak lifecycle processes and a lack of visibility into account usage information, many NHIs end up inactive, increasing the attack surface area. You cannot hire a few key SMEs/Consultants https://dragonsupport-number.com/unveiling-samsungs-blockchain-prowess-innovation-in-action/ 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. You cannot simply buy a product that will take care of this completely for medium to large organisations with a hybrid environment. Unless an organisation already has mature controls and capabilities for managing NHIs, they are likely to uncover thousands of unmanaged hardcoded credentials in the environment (both internally and externally) that can be easily discovered or are already known. Machines and devices, to me, fall under one category, while software workloads fall under another, as they need to be managed very differently. The majority of vendors and groups use the NHI term, although some prefer not to use a term defined by being the opposite of “human”.

Automated lifecycle management

In total, productivity must be balanced with security and compliance requirements to ensure that engineers can perform their duties without compromising security and adding unacceptable risk for the organization. Is there a process to ensure that the right schedule of key rotation can be automated or at least performed with a minimum of manual steps? These reviews help ensure that NHIs have appropriate permissions and that their level of access aligns with security policies and least privilege.

For example, if they take over a compromised container, they might use its permissions to reach your storage buckets, databases, or other services. It’s common for organizations to lose track of the non-human identities they create. Many non-human identities have more access controls than they actually need. Here are five security risks of non-human identities and how to handle them.

We recently published a major report on 40 NHI breaches that have occurred over the last 2-3 years, with a clear uptick in reported breaches in 2024. Once a hacker is in, they typically target NHI accounts, given the high level of privileges they have to critical systems and data. This has led to an exponential increase in NHIs, hyper-fragmentation, making it very hard to implement controls over this very complex landscape. This makes things like password cycling much more complex, as you don’t know all the dependencies of where a credential is being used. Sharing of Credentials – Sharing NHIs across applications is a major issue, breaking the principles of need-to-have and least-privilege. It is critical to identify an owner for each NHI to help drive hygiene and remediation activities.

Cloud engineers spawn identities automatically through infrastructure-as-code templates. A developer writes code requiring database access and creates a service account. While non-human identities operate without human intervention, they don’t exist in isolation.

The most effective NHIM solutions combine secrets management, access governance, and lifecycle automation functions to reduce complexity, improve compliance, and help businesses scale NHIM securely across environments. Use Role- or Attribute-Based Access Control (RBAC/ABAC) to manage access at scale, and use automatically expiring secrets (credentials, certificates and keys) to ensure zero standing privileges. As enterprises increasingly adopt automation and AI agents, non-human identities security has become a critical extension of identity security and cloud entitlement management. The emerging attack surface around AI agents lacks mature governance frameworks. AI agents represent the newest and fastest-growing category of non-human identities. While access tokens typically expire within hours, refresh tokens can persist for months or years, automatically minting new access tokens without user interaction.

The attack started with an exposed .git directory, progressed through https://thejuon.com/smarter-stock-smarter-business-iots-role.html mismanaged CI/CD pipeline configurations, and ended up with unauthorized server access. Threat actors exploited these tokens to gain access to critical systems, databases, and user data. The Internet Archive Breach – In October 2024, the Internet Archive fell victim to a major data breach affecting 31 million user accounts.

As Robert said, “non-human identities have the ability to enhance the strength and resiliency of your identity security program as a force multiplier. Credential misuse is another major concern NHIs pose, with issues like hardcoded credentials, orphaned accounts and weak API keys that elevate the risk of breaches. Despite their prevalence, NHIs are often unmanaged, unmonitored and under protected – creating a perfect storm for attackers to exploit. NHIs now execute tasks that once required human intervention, from analyzing security threats to approving transactions.