Yes, because service accounts and other non-human identities participate in the same entitlement landscape as people. If they sit outside the roles model, drift can accumulate in machine access paths that are harder to review and easier to overlook during governance cycles.
What changes when you validate users and non-human identities under the same access model?
Validating both populations under one access model means you are checking the same core questions for each actor: who owns the identity, what it is allowed to do, how it is reviewed, and when it must be removed or rotated. The practical benefit is consistency. The control objective is not to force identical treatment, but to avoid a separate, weaker governance path for machine access.
That matters because non-human identities often use the same entitlement structures as users, even when their credentials, lifecycle, and authentication methods differ. In practice, a single model helps expose shared failure modes such as excessive privilege, orphaned accounts, and access that survives long after the workload or integration should have been retired. IAM and IGA Basics is useful here because it frames access governance around entitlements and reviews rather than around who, or what, is holding them.
Done well, the model becomes a governance wrapper, not a one-size-fits-all authenticator. Users may rely on interactive sign-in, while service accounts may rely on keys, certificates, federated tokens, or workload identity. The access model still needs to record the same things that matter for review: purpose, owner, scope, and revocation path. Human vs Non-Human Identity is a strong companion reference because it clarifies where the populations differ while still supporting a unified governance approach.
Where the entitlement model breaks down for machine access
The main failure point is not the idea of one model, it is assuming that machine identities will self-document or self-correct. They usually do not. Non-human identities can accumulate privileges through automation, cloning, integration sprawl, or inherited roles, and those paths are easy to miss if review processes are built only around human access patterns. Service Account Security Guide is relevant because it focuses on the common operational reality: service accounts need discovery, ownership, least privilege, and governance just like other identities.
A second breakdown is lifecycle drift. If access reviews are annual, but a workload changes weekly, the model can be formally correct and operationally stale. That mismatch leaves active machine access in place after the original need has disappeared. Access Reviews and Certification Guide supports the review side of the problem by emphasizing context-rich certification rather than checkbox approval.
A third breakdown is credential shape. People can be reviewed through login history and role membership, but machines may authenticate with API keys, tokens, certificates, or federated trust. If those credentials are not mapped back to the owning identity and reviewed as part of the same entitlement set, the access model becomes incomplete even if the directory looks clean. NHI Authentication Guide is useful because it shows how machine authentication mechanisms still fit inside identity governance.
What a unified access model should prove before you trust it
A valid answer is not just that the identity exists in a directory. It must show that the identity has an owner, a business purpose, explicit permissions, and a revocation path that is exercised in practice. For non-human identities, that also means confirming whether access is shared, embedded in code, delegated through a platform, or tied to a specific workload. NHI Ownership and Accountability Guide supports the ownership test, which is often the deciding factor in whether machine access stays governable.
The most useful operating question is whether your review process can explain why the access exists today, not just how it was created. If reviewers cannot answer that, the model is probably recording accounts but not governing entitlement. Top 10 NHI Issues is a good navigation aid for the recurring control failures that appear when machine identities are managed separately from people.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 addresses the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Machine identities often depend on keys, tokens, or certificates that need lifecycle control. |
| IA-9 — Service Identification and Authentication | Service accounts and workload identities authenticate as non-human actors in the access model. | |
| AC-6 — Least Privilege | The question is about validating entitlement scope for both people and non-human identities. | |
| Recommendation — Manage credential issuance, rotation, storage, and revocation for non-human access material. Apply service authentication controls to non-human identities that access systems and APIs. Limit each identity to the minimum permissions required for its current function. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The topic centers on governing users and non-human accounts in one access model. |
| Recommendation — Inventory, review, and remove accounts and access paths that no longer have a valid owner or purpose. | ||
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | Unified access validation is meant to prevent excessive permissions on non-human identities. |
| NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | A shared access model must revoke non-human access when the workload or integration ends. | |
| Recommendation — Review machine identities for excess privilege and correct scope drift before it becomes persistent. Remove non-human identities and their credentials when the associated function is retired. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Put ownership, purpose, and revocation evidence ahead of cosmetic parity between human and machine workflows. A shared access model is only useful if it can answer the same governance questions for both populations.
What to verify: Check that every non-human identity has a named owner, a documented business function, and a reviewable set of entitlements. If a service account cannot be tied back to a current workload or integration, treat it as a governance gap, not just an inventory issue.
Common mistake: Teams often validate machine identities in the directory but not in the access-review process. That creates a false sense of coverage while leaving high-risk entitlements untouched.
Practitioner takeaway: The right test is not whether machine identities look different from users, it is whether they are governed with the same rigor wherever privilege is granted and removed.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should security teams run access reviews for non-human identities?
- How should security teams govern non-human identities that have persistent access?
- Should organisations use the same policy model for humans and non-human identities?
- Should organisations apply the same access review process to human and non-human identities?