How NHIs are reshaping identity security responsibilities

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of how NHI growth is changing IAM job responsibilities, with the key finding that human-centric identity practices no longer cover service accounts, APIs, and other machine identities.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and governance teams now have to manage identity risk across human and non-human populations with different lifecycle, visibility, and privilege patterns.

By the numbers:

• Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.

👉 Read Oasis Security's analysis of how NHIs are reshaping identity security roles

Context

Non-human identity governance is now part of the IAM operating model, not a specialist side project. When service accounts, API keys, and tokens become permanent parts of production architecture, the identity team is responsible for managing access that never behaves like a human user and cannot be governed with human workflows alone.

Oasis Security’s analysis uses job responsibility language to show how the mandate is shifting for IAM professionals. The central issue is not simply more identities, but identities that run continuously, hold elevated privilege, and often sit outside the visibility and lifecycle controls built for people.

That starting position is typical for modern enterprises that have expanded cloud, automation, and application-to-application access faster than their identity governance model has adapted.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams handle service accounts with standing privilege?

A: Security teams should treat service accounts with standing privilege as a lifecycle and exposure problem, not just an access review problem. Start by identifying the owner, purpose, and dependencies for each account, then reduce scope, automate rotation, and tie revocation to system change. Standing privilege becomes dangerous when nobody can prove why it still exists.

Q: Why do non-human identities complicate IAM governance?

A: Non-human identities complicate IAM governance because they do not behave like people. They authenticate without interactive sessions, persist across deployments, and can be shared or embedded in code. That means the controls that work for users, such as MFA and periodic review cadences, often miss the real NHI risk, which is secret exposure and privilege drift.

Q: What breaks when API keys are not rotated and revoked on time?

A: When API keys are not rotated and revoked on time, old access continues to work even after ownership changes, vendor offboarding, or application updates. That creates a standing exposure window where credentials remain valid far longer than their business need. The failure is usually not authentication itself, but lifecycle control and ownership.

Q: How do IAM teams know whether NHI monitoring is actually working?

A: NHI monitoring is working when teams can reliably see who owns each credential, where it is used, and whether its behaviour matches the workload it supports. Good monitoring produces alerts on unusual privilege use, unexpected cross-environment access, and stale credentials that still authenticate. If none of that is visible, the programme is blind.

Technical breakdown

Why service accounts and API keys break human IAM assumptions

Service accounts and API keys are non-human identities because they authenticate systems rather than people. They often operate continuously, do not perform interactive authentication, and may be embedded in scripts, applications, or CI/CD pipelines. That changes the security problem from user login control to secret custody, credential visibility, and privilege scope. A human IAM model assumes a named person, a predictable session, and a revocable account lifecycle. NHI reality is different: the identity may be shared, hardcoded, long-lived, and invisible to standard directory-based review processes. When that happens, monitoring and key management become core identity controls, not separate hygiene tasks.

Practical implication: inventory where non-human credentials live, who can use them, and whether they can be rotated without breaking production.

Lifecycle automation for non-human identities

NHI lifecycle management covers provisioning, rotation, renewal, and de-provisioning, but the control objective is different from human joiner-mover-leaver workflows. A service account can be created by one team, consumed by another, and forgotten when the application changes. That is why policy-based automation matters: manual ticketing and email-based approvals are too slow to keep pace with machine identity sprawl. The real technical challenge is not just issuing credentials, but ensuring they are updated and revoked in step with application change, vendor offboarding, and environment drift. Without that, stale access accumulates even when the account itself looks active.

Practical implication: tie non-human credential changes to system events, deployment pipelines, and ownership changes, not calendar reminders.

Monitoring non-human identity activity at machine speed

Monitoring NHIs is harder than monitoring human users because their activity is higher volume, less interactive, and often embedded inside service-to-service traffic. Standard identity reports may show an account as active without revealing whether its behaviour is expected. Effective detection needs telemetry on privilege use, secret usage patterns, and unusual access paths across cloud and application layers. This is where identity monitoring becomes a control-plane problem: teams need to detect when a non-human identity behaves outside its expected task scope, not just when a login fails. That distinction matters because many NHI abuse cases do not look like classic user compromise at all.

Practical implication: baseline normal machine-to-machine behaviour and alert on abnormal privilege use, not just failed authentication events.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.
• Dropbox Sign breach — compromised Dropbox Sign service account exposed API keys and OAuth tokens.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Service account governance has become an enterprise identity discipline, not a back-office admin task. Once applications, integrations, and automation rely on non-human identities, IAM ownership extends beyond user directories into code, pipelines, and cloud services. That changes the operating model for access control, review, and remediation. Practitioners should treat NHI governance as a core identity programme requirement, not an adjunct to PAM or secrets management.

Continuous monitoring is now a baseline control for machine identities because activity can persist outside human review cycles. The article’s responsibility framing is accurate on one point: machine identities do not fit periodic oversight well. When credentials stay valid between change events, the control problem becomes persistence and visibility rather than authentication friction. Practitioners should align detection, review, and ownership around machine activity patterns rather than human cadence.

Identity blast radius is the right named concept for this shift. NHIs often carry broader operational privilege than users, and that privilege can be reused across apps, environments, and teams. The result is a larger blast radius when one credential is exposed or over-scoped. Practitioners should view scope reduction as an identity governance objective across both human and non-human estates.

Legacy IAM job descriptions are now under-specifying the real remit of identity teams. The work is no longer limited to directory access, MFA, and user lifecycle governance. It also includes service accounts, APIs, secrets, monitoring, and automated remediation. Practitioners should reframe team responsibilities around the full identity fabric, because that is where the operational risk now sits.

From our research:

• Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures.
• That gap is why Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs is the right next resource for teams formalising rotation, revocation, and offboarding.

What this signals

Identity blast radius: as NHIs multiply, the issue for practitioners is not only discovery but containment. Teams need a working model for where credentials live, which services inherit them, and how far one compromised secret can travel before it is revoked.

With 96% of organisations storing secrets outside secrets managers in vulnerable locations, the governance problem is already embedded in delivery pipelines. That means identity teams should focus on pipeline-linked controls and ownership clarity, not just directory-centric reporting.

For a practical next step, map the non-human estate against OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and cross-check the lifecycle discipline in Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs.

For practitioners

• Inventory all non-human identities and their owners Build a complete register of service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates across cloud, code, and automation systems. Include business owner, technical owner, purpose, and last-known rotation date so no credential exists without accountability.
• Move lifecycle events into automated workflows Link provisioning, rotation, renewal, and de-provisioning to application change, deployment events, and ownership handoffs. Use policy-based automation so access is updated when systems change, not after a manual request is filed.
• Reduce excessive privilege on machine identities Review service accounts and API keys for permissions they do not actively need, then narrow scopes to the smallest stable set that still supports the workload. Re-certify privileges after major code, platform, or vendor changes.
• Baseline machine identity telemetry Track secret usage, privilege invocation, and cross-system access patterns so abnormal activity stands out. Make sure monitoring covers the identity layer, not only endpoint or network events, because many NHI abuses are invisible there.
• Align IAM ownership with cross-functional teams Formalise handoffs between IAM, engineering, cloud, and application owners so machine identities are not left between teams. Shared responsibility without named ownership is where long-lived credentials and stale access usually persist.

Key takeaways

• The article shows that identity work now extends well beyond human users, because service accounts, APIs, and tokens sit inside the core operational perimeter.
• The scale problem is visible in the data: most organisations still lack formal offboarding and rotation processes for API keys, which keeps access alive after its business need ends.
• The practical response is to make ownership, rotation, and monitoring mandatory controls for non-human identities, not optional hygiene steps.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity: A non-human identity is any credentialed system actor such as a service account, API key, token, certificate, or workload identity. It is used by software rather than a person and therefore needs lifecycle control, ownership, and monitoring that fit machine behaviour instead of human login patterns.
• Service Account: A service account is a machine identity used by applications, integrations, or infrastructure components to authenticate and perform work. It can become a hidden risk when it has broad privileges, unclear ownership, or long-lived credentials that are never rotated or revoked.
• Secret Rotation: Secret rotation is the controlled replacement of credentials before they become overused or exposed. For NHIs, it is a governance process as much as a technical one, because rotation only works when the organisation can update dependencies, confirm ownership, and revoke the old secret cleanly.
• Identity Blast Radius: Identity blast radius is the amount of operational access and downstream reach that a single credential can expose if it is misused or compromised. In NHI environments, it often grows because accounts are over-privileged, embedded in systems, and reused across multiple services.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI lifecycle governance, visibility, and remediation are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or reworking those controls for service accounts and APIs, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Oasis Security: How NHIs Are Reshaping the Responsibilities of Identity Security Professionals. Read the original.