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. Despite their prevalence, NHIs frequently lack adequate security oversight, making them prime targets for exploitation.
What are non-human identities?
Unlike human identities tied to individual users, NHIs refer to the digital credentials used by machines, applications, services, and scripts to interact with systems and data. These credentials include certificates, API keys, service accounts, SSH keys, and tokens. Gartner defines machine identity management as the systematic process of securely managing and protecting these digital identities, especially for servers, applications, and network devices.
As organizations automate more workloads and adopt cloud-native architectures, NHIs are increasingly indispensable for secure communication and are critical for safeguarding sensitive data and intellectual property from cyber threats.
What is non-human identity management?
NHI management includes the identity creation, usage, rotation, and decommissioning lifecycle. It also enforces access control, protects data in transit, and enables trust between digital entities. Robust NHI management is crucial for complying with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.
Managing NHIs extends far beyond technical administration. It is a strategic pillar of enterprise security. 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.
Beyond these core functions, NHI management plays a pivotal role in modern security architectures. It is fundamental to zero trust models, which require verifying every human or machine connection. 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.
... ad-hoc approaches directly threaten strategic security objectives
Without proper identity management, these bots could be hijacked or impersonated. Similarly, NHI management secures automated access to Tier Zero assets, critical systems like domain controllers and identity providers, by ensuring that only authorized non-human entities can access them. Gartner's assessment that most organizations are "dangerously underprepared" with "fragmented governance"1, underscores that current ad-hoc approaches directly threaten strategic security objectives.
What is the current state of non-human identity security?
The massive growth of non-human, machine and AI identities spurred by cloud-hosted services, DevOps tools, and now AI tools has introduced significant security challenges. Recent studies, adjusted to include the AI tool identity component, reveal that organizations often have tens of thousands of non-human credentials, sometimes outnumbering human identities by as much as 82 to 1. Despite this, many organizations struggle to manage and secure these identities effectively.
A 2024 Aembit report revealed that 88.5% of organizations acknowledge their non-human IAM practices lag or are only on par with their user IAM efforts. It also revealed that 50% of organizations reported security breaches linked to compromised NHIs in the past year.
Key pain points common to many such reports include:
- Discovery and inventory: No comprehensive inventory of NHIs, leading to unmanaged and potentially vulnerable identities within their systems.
- Access and privilege management: Overprivileged NHIs pose significant risks, as compromised credentials can grant attackers extensive access to critical systems.
- Auditing and monitoring: Non-existent or inadequate continuous monitoring of NHI activities, making detecting and responding to malicious actions challenging.
- Policy enforcement: Complexity challenges in implementing and enforcing security policies tailored to NHIs.
- The role of AI in attacks: Cybercriminals increasingly deploy AI to gain unauthorized access and exploit NHIs. Concerns are widespread regarding AI poisoning, AI model theft, and AI-driven social engineering threats.
The conclusion is that robust identity security measures tailored to the unique characteristics of NHIs are urgently needed.
Industry reports reveal an escalating and immediate crisis, not a distant threat. Highly regarded threat researchers like CrowdStrike perceive non-human identities as the "next frontier of adversary exploitation." Coupled with the high incidence of organizations already experiencing related security incidents, this points to a critical gap between awareness and effective implementation.
Many leading researchers use "machine identity" to refer to the most visible subset of NHIs, but the same principles apply across the broader spectrum. Venafi's assertion that "failing to secure machine identities at the workload level makes all other security efforts obsolete" is a profound observation. This elevates NHI security from a mere component to a prerequisite for overall cybersecurity effectiveness. The increasing sophistication introduced by AI in cyberattacks demands more advanced and automated defense mechanisms for NHIs.
What are the most critical NHI security challenges today?
The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) Non-Human Identities Top 10 for 2025 outlines the most critical challenges in integrating NHIs into the development lifecycle, ranked by exploitability, prevalence, detectability, and impact.
These challenges are often interconnected and are direct manifestations of fragmented or absent NHI lifecycle management. The solutions, therefore, must focus on a holistic, automated, and centralized NHI management approach rather than addressing each OWASP item in isolation.
The Human Use of NHI challenge directly correlates with the Venafi finding that "74% cited human error as the weakest link in machine identity security". This highlights a critical intersection where human misuse of NHIs, such as using shared service accounts for manual tasks, introduces vulnerabilities like elevated privileges and a lack of auditability.
Effective NHI management solutions must automate NHI processes and include vigorous policy enforcement and training to prevent human misuse, bridging the gap between technical controls and human behavior.
The following table details each OWASP challenge, its real-world implications, relevant industry findings, and specific NHI management solutions.
| OWASP NHI challenge | Description | Real-world implications | How Delinea helps |
|
NHI1:2025 Improper offboarding |
Inadequate deactivation or removal of unnecessary NHIs. | Unmonitored, deprecated services remain vulnerable and can be exploited for unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data. | A centralized identity security solution ensures comprehensive lifecycle management of NHIs, including timely deactivation during offboarding. Automated workflows enforce policies for decommissioning NHIs, reducing the risk of orphaned accounts. |
|
NHI2:2025 Secret leakage |
Sensitive NHIs (API keys, tokens, encryption keys, certificates) leaked to unsanctioned data stores. | Exposed secrets lead to unauthorized access if they are hard-coded, stored in plain text, or sent over public channels. | A secure vault that stores and manages secrets ensures that sensitive credentials are not exposed. Dynamic Secrets mitigate risk through on-demand generation of ephemeral credentials. This centralizes access control and enforces encryption, significantly reducing risk. |
|
NHI3:2025 Vulnerable third-party NHI |
Compromised third-party extensions (IDEs, SaaS apps) used in development workflows. | Exploited to steal credentials or misuse granted permissions, leading to unauthorized access. | Privilege Control for Cloud Entitlements (PCCE) provides visibility into 3rd-party identities and their permissions in cloud environments, and Identity Threat Protection (ITP) detects risks such as stale accounts. Implementing strict access controls and regularly reviewing permissions limits the potential impact of compromised third-party NHIs, and continuous monitoring of all identities detects anomalous behavior indicative of a breach. |
|
NHI4:2025 Insecure authentication |
Use of deprecated, vulnerable, or weak authentication methods for internal/external services. | Exposes organizations to significant risks of unauthorized access. | Enforce strong, modern authentication mechanisms for all NHIs, while avoiding deprecated methods like basic authentication. Support secure, identity-bound approaches such as certificate-based authentication using vaulted PKI certificates and SSH keys. Enable ITP threat monitoring and comprehensive logging, with traceability back to specific NHIs and contextual information. This facilitates effective incident response and behavioral analysis. |
|
NHI5:2025 Overprivileged NHI |
NHIs assigned more privileges than functionally required. | Attackers can exploit excessive permissions for lateral movement and broader system compromise. | Implement the principle of least privilege, giving NHIs only the permissions essential to their function. Regular audits of NHI permissions identify and remediate overprivileged accounts. Use CIEM’s visibility into effective permissions and ability to simulate least-privilege scenarios. |
|
NHI6:2025 Insecure cloud deployment configurations |
CI/CD applications using static credentials or improperly validated OIDC tokens for cloud services. | Static credentials exposed via code repositories/logs; OIDC misconfigurations lead to unauthorized access. | Utilize dynamic secrets and short-lived credentials for cloud services to reduce the risk associated with static credentials. Automated tools can detect and remediate misconfigurations in cloud deployments, enhancing overall security. |
|
NHI7:2025 Long-lived secrets |
Sensitive NHIs (API keys, tokens, certificates) with excessively long or no expiration dates. | A breached long-lived secret provides attackers with persistent access to sensitive services. | Enforce policies for regular automatic rotation of secrets and implement automated expiration of credentials, ensuring long-lived secrets are minimized. This approach limits the window of opportunity for attackers to exploit compromised credentials. |
|
NHI8:2025 Environment isolation |
Reusing NHIs across development, testing, staging, and production environments. | Introduces significant security vulnerabilities; compromise in one environment can affect others. | Establish strict isolation between environments with unique NHIs for each, so a compromise in one environment does not affect others. Implement environment-specific access controls to enhance security. Secret Server's hierarchical folder structure provides logical separation of Secrets along with policy-based access controls and tagging/metadata enforcement for policy-driven controls. |
|
NHI9:2025 NHI reuse |
Reusing the same NHI across different applications, services, or components. | If compromised in one area, an attacker gains unauthorized access to other parts of the system using the same credentials. | Assign a unique NHI to each application or service to prevent one compromised NHI from affecting multiple systems. Enforce this practice with automated discovery and management of NHIs Delinea's discovery can detect credential reuse, shadow admins, and bypasses of vaulting controls through continuous scanning, audit logs, session monitoring, and automated remediation. |
|
NHI10:2025 Human use of NHI |
Developers/admins misusing NHIs for manual tasks that should use individual human identities. | Introduces elevated privileges for NHIs, lack of auditing, and indistinguishable activity between humans and automation. | Delinea's discovery capabilities find and inventory all identities, including non-human accounts. It catalogs those intended for non-human use, uncovers misconfigurations such as service accounts being used interactively, and detects users who are bypassing policies/controls. |
Building a robust strategy for non-human identity security
Overcoming NHIs' challenges requires a cohesive and strategic approach, moving beyond fragmented or ad hoc solutions. The recurring emphasis on centralization, automation, and comprehensive lifecycle management identifies these as the critical pillars for addressing the current state of NHI security. Implementing these pillars represents a fundamental strategic shift, moving beyond temporary fixes.
An NHI security strategy should encompass the following key elements:
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However, mitigating these risks doesn't fall squarely on the shoulders of Privileged Access Management (PAM). Modern identity security that combines capabilities from several related disciplines is necessary to do a good job, as shown in the image above.
By integrating comprehensive identity security solutions, you can effectively mitigate the risks associated with NHIs and ensure robust systems and data protection.