The recommended staged approach: first, tag and classify each discovered NHI. Second, initiate an ownership review using naming, location, or associated resources. For NHIs with no identifiable owner and no recent activity, the presumption should be decommissioning — disable first, delete after a validation period.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Hundreds of unowned NHIs are not just an inventory problem. They are usually a sign that credentials, service accounts, API keys, certificates, or bots have outlived the process that created them. Once ownership is lost, so is routine rotation, approval, and offboarding. NHI Mgmt Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, which makes unmanaged sprawl a scale problem, not an edge case.
The first mistake is trying to “find the owner later” while leaving everything active. That usually prolongs exposure and creates a false sense of control. A better response is to treat unowned NHIs as potentially abandoned assets until proven otherwise, then apply classification, containment, and validation before any restoration of access. That approach aligns with the lifecycle emphasis in the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and with the access governance direction in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.
Practitioners should also assume that at least some of those NHIs have accumulated excessive privilege or were copied into multiple systems over time. In practice, many security teams encounter abuse only after a leaked token or dormant service account has already been used for lateral movement, rather than through intentional lifecycle review.
How It Works in Practice
Start with a rapid triage pass: classify each NHI by type, environment, sensitivity, and activity. Separate production from non-production, human-operated automation from fully autonomous tooling, and ephemeral credentials from long-lived secrets. If a record has no clear owner, no recent authenticated use, and no business-critical dependency, presumption should favor disablement, not debate. That is consistent with NHI governance patterns discussed in the Top 10 NHI Issues.
Then run an ownership review using the strongest signals available: naming conventions, vault metadata, CI/CD references, cloud tags, workload associations, and the resources that depend on the identity. If the identity appears to support an agentic workflow, verify what the workload actually does at runtime, not just what was intended at deployment. For that reason, current guidance suggests pairing identity review with runtime access evidence from logs, vaults, and policy engines. The security rationale is reinforced by the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis, which is useful when leaders need to show why dormant identities are operational risk, not clean-up noise.
- Disable first, then monitor for a validation window before deletion.
- Require a named business or engineering owner before re-enabling access.
- Rotate or revoke any secret discovered in code, tickets, or shared docs.
- Document dependencies so downstream services can be re-bound safely.
Use policy and workflow controls so this becomes repeatable: ownership assignment, exception approval, decommissioning, and evidence capture. These controls tend to break down in highly dynamic CI/CD and Kubernetes environments because the same identity can be recreated automatically faster than teams can reconcile ownership.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter containment often increases operational friction, requiring organisations to balance rapid risk reduction against the possibility of service disruption. That tradeoff is especially visible when the unowned NHI belongs to a legacy application, shared integration, or third-party dependency that no one wants to break.
Guidance is still evolving for some edge cases. For example, if an identity supports a critical batch process but has no formal owner, best practice is to establish temporary stewardship, shorten its TTL where possible, and move it into the normal lifecycle rather than leaving it in limbo. The same is true for autonomous agents: their “owner” may need to be a platform or product team, but their permissions still need explicit accountability and review.
Where no owner can be found, decommissioning remains the default, but only after a validation period and dependency check. This is where Cisco DevHub NHI breach and the broader context in Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks are useful: they show how unmanaged identity sprawl can turn into a wider compromise path. The practical rule is simple, but not always easy to execute. If the identity cannot be owned, justified, or observed, it should not remain active.
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 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Covers ownership, inventory, and lifecycle gaps in non-human identities. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Identity governance is central to validating and controlling NHI access. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | Zero Trust supports continuous verification instead of trusting dormant NHIs. |
Inventory every NHI, assign an accountable owner, and disable identities that cannot be justified.
