Human and nonhuman identity controls are diverging fast

At a glance

What this is: This analysis shows that human and nonhuman identities require different control models, and that treating them the same creates avoidable exposure as machine identities scale rapidly.

Why it matters: IAM, IGA and PAM teams need to separate human and nonhuman governance now because misclassification, overpermissioning and weak lifecycle controls expand blast radius across SaaS, automation and AI agent estates.

By the numbers:

• Nonhuman identities now outnumber human identities at a ratio of 144 to 1, according to Entro Security’s H1 2025 research, up from 92 to 1 just one year earlier.
• Entro’s research found that 97% of NHIs have excessive privileges and 71% are not rotated within recommended timeframes.

👉 Read Aembit's analysis of human and nonhuman identity controls

Context

Human and nonhuman identities are governed differently because they behave differently. Humans authenticate interactively, produce usable behaviour baselines and leave through offboarding workflows. Nonhuman identities authenticate programmatically, run continuously and often persist without a clear owner, which makes them harder to classify and easier to overprivilege.

The primary NHI governance gap is not technology volume alone. It is that many IAM programmes still apply human identity assumptions to service accounts, tokens, scripts and AI-driven workloads, even though those identities need granular scoping, automated lifecycle management and just-in-time credential issuance to stay within control.

The article's core point is that NHI sprawl and AI agent growth are expanding the attack surface faster than traditional IAM processes were designed to handle. That is already typical in SaaS-heavy environments, not an edge case.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when organisations manage service accounts like human users?

A: Service accounts do not behave like people, so human IAM controls miss the real risks. They run continuously, use static or long-lived credentials, and often lack a clear owner or review cycle. When teams apply human models to machines, they tend to overgrant access, miss orphaned credentials and overlook scope drift until a breach or outage exposes it.

Q: Why do nonhuman identities increase lateral movement risk?

A: Nonhuman identities often carry broad, persistent access across cloud, SaaS and automation environments. If one token, key or service account is compromised, the attacker may inherit rights that span multiple systems without needing interactive login. That makes standing privilege and weak lifecycle management the main drivers of lateral movement in machine identity estates.

Q: How do security teams know if NHI controls are actually working?

A: Look for evidence that every machine identity has a named owner, a scoped purpose, and an expiry or revocation path. Effective control also means secrets are not embedded in code or left active after workloads change. If reviews still depend on human access recertification alone, the programme is not covering NHI risk properly.

Q: Who is accountable when a compromised NHI exposes data?

A: Accountability sits with the team that created, approved and operates the identity, not with the platform alone. NHI incidents often happen because ownership is diffuse across development, infrastructure and security. Governance frameworks should make ownership explicit, tie entitlements to business purpose and require revocation when that purpose ends.

Technical breakdown

Why human IAM controls fail for nonhuman identities

Human IAM assumes interactive logins, session boundaries and behavioural variance that can be monitored for anomalies. Nonhuman identities authenticate through API calls, service links or token exchange, often without a person present and without a session a user can meaningfully terminate. That changes the control problem from identity proofing to entitlement containment, ownership and lifecycle enforcement. If teams keep applying MFA-centric thinking to machine identities, they miss the actual failure mode: long-lived access that never passes through human-centric review paths.

Practical implication: separate machine identity policy from human access policy and review whether each NHI has an owner, expiry and bounded scope.

Why static secrets create durable NHI exposure

API tokens, OAuth keys and service account passwords are durable because they can survive long after the workload, integration or developer that created them has changed. A static secret is not just a credential, it is a persistence mechanism. Once it is embedded in code, CI pipelines or SaaS integrations, it can remain usable even when operational context changes. That is why secret management for NHIs is fundamentally about reducing standing exposure, not simply storing credentials in a safer place.

Practical implication: prioritise removal of long-lived secrets and enforce expiry, revocation and ownership checks wherever tokens or keys still exist.

How identity sprawl expands the attack surface

Every third-party integration, automation script and cloud workload can introduce a new nonhuman identity, often outside the visibility of the core identity team. The result is identity sprawl, where the number of entitlements grows faster than the organisation can classify, rotate or review them. In practice, this means a small set of unmanaged credentials can expose large parts of the environment because many NHIs are overpermissioned by design. The technical problem is not just scale, but the lack of lifecycle and scoping discipline at creation time.

Practical implication: inventory NHIs across SaaS, cloud and automation estates, then collapse duplicate or orphaned identities before widening access further.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker aims to use a machine identity's standing access to reach critical systems and extract data without triggering human-centric controls.

1. entry: attackers exploit exposed NHI credentials such as API tokens, OAuth keys or service account passwords that were never rotated or revoked.
2. escalation: overprivileged machine identities provide access that is broader than the original task, allowing direct movement into databases, SaaS tenants or automation systems.
3. impact: the attacker exfiltrates data or maintains unnoticed access through a credential that outlives the workload or owner that created it.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.
• JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure — CVE-2024-37051 in JetBrains IntelliJ GitHub plugin exposed GitHub access 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

Human-centric IAM is no longer the default control plane for modern identity estates. The article shows that machine identities now outnumber human identities at a scale that changes governance priorities, not just inventory counts. Service accounts, tokens and automation credentials behave as infrastructure primitives, so treating them as a human IAM edge case guarantees blind spots. Practitioners should treat NHI governance as a primary discipline, not a sub-feature of user access management.

Static credential persistence is the failure mode this article exposes most clearly. The same secret can remain valid long after the workload it supports has changed, been decommissioned or lost ownership. That is a standing credential exposure window, and it is the control gap attackers exploit when NHI lifecycle management is manual or absent. The implication is not simply more rotation, but a different governance model for credentials that should not survive beyond their operational purpose.

Identity blast radius becomes the decisive risk metric when NHIs are overprivileged. The article's 97% excessive-privilege figure shows that the problem is not only discovery, but the breadth of access attached to discovered identities. Once a token or service account can reach multiple systems, a single compromise becomes a multi-system incident. Practitioners should re-evaluate entitlement scope, not just credential hygiene, because the attack surface is created at provisioning time.

OWASP NHI Top 10 is becoming the right lens for operationalising NHI risk. As SaaS and AI agent adoption increase the number of nonhuman identities, organisations need a shared language for the failure patterns they keep repeating: overprivilege, lack of rotation, weak monitoring and poor ownership. That shared model is what turns scattered findings into a governable programme. The practical conclusion is that NHI security has crossed from niche hygiene into mainstream identity control design.

Cross-domain governance now matters more than product-specific fixes. Human IAM, NHI management and AI agent oversight are converging on the same lifecycle question: who owns the identity, how long should it exist, and what limits its reach. The article shows that programmes which separate those questions by team or tool miss the compound risk. Practitioners should align lifecycle, PAM and SaaS governance around the identity subject, not the system label.

From our research:

• Only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, compared to nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
• 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, including 38% with no or low visibility and 47% with only partial visibility.
• For a broader control lens, OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 helps teams map where autonomous tool use compounds identity risk.

What this signals

Identity programmes are entering an NHI-first phase: the practical question is no longer whether to separate human and machine governance, but how quickly to do it before sprawl outpaces review cycles. That shift matters because credentials, ownership and lifecycle now drive most of the operational risk, not user login behaviour.

A useful mental model is identity blast radius: the combination of scope, duration and reuse that determines how far one credential can reach. Once teams start measuring that, they can see why a small number of overprivileged NHIs create disproportionate exposure across SaaS, cloud and automation.

The next governance step is to connect machine identity inventory to policy enforcement and lifecycle events, not to rely on periodic human access reviews. Teams that keep using user-centric cadences will keep missing the identities that never sit still long enough to fit that process.

For practitioners

• Classify nonhuman identities separately from user accounts Create a distinct inventory for service accounts, API tokens, OAuth keys, automation credentials and AI agent identities. Tag each by owner, workload, expiry and business function so human and machine governance never share the same review queue.
• Reduce standing privilege before expanding discovery Review the highest-value databases, APIs and SaaS integrations first, then remove excess entitlements and narrow scopes before you attempt full estate cleanup. This cuts the blast radius even when the wider inventory is still incomplete.
• Automate lifecycle controls for every machine credential Enforce creation, renewal, expiry and revocation workflows for secrets that back NHIs. Orphaned identities and forgotten tokens should fail closed when ownership or purpose cannot be confirmed.
• Shift machine authentication away from static secrets Use identity- and posture-aware controls that issue access only when the workload context matches policy, and prefer secretless or short-lived credential patterns wherever systems support them.
• Tie SaaS and third-party integrations to accountable owners Require a named owner for every externally connected integration and review whether the platform can distinguish human users from nonhuman identities before approving broad OAuth or API access.

Key takeaways

• The article's main warning is that human IAM assumptions do not hold for nonhuman identities, which are now numerous enough to reshape governance priorities.
• The scale of the problem is already visible in the data, with most NHIs overprivileged and a large share not rotated within recommended timeframes.
• The control answer is not a single tool but a different operating model built around ownership, scoping, expiry and automated lifecycle management.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity: A non-human identity is any credentialed entity that acts on behalf of software, infrastructure or automation rather than a person. In practice this includes service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates and AI agents. These identities need their own ownership, scoping and lifecycle controls because they do not behave like user accounts.
• Identity Blast Radius: Identity blast radius is the amount of access damage a single identity can cause if it is misused or compromised. It is shaped by scope, duration, reuse and privilege depth. For NHIs, the blast radius is often larger than teams expect because machine credentials are persistent and embedded in production workflows.
• Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is access that remains continuously available instead of being granted only when needed. For non-human identities, standing privilege often exists through long-lived secrets, broad OAuth grants or overpermissioned service accounts. It raises risk because compromise can be exploited immediately, without a fresh approval step.
• Lifecycle Management: Lifecycle management is the process of creating, updating, reviewing and removing identities as their purpose changes. For NHIs, this means tracking who owns the credential, what workload it supports, when it expires and how it is revoked. Without that discipline, machine identities accumulate silently and become forgotten access paths.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI lifecycle governance and machine credential scoping are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If your programme is still mapping human controls onto service accounts and tokens, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Aembit: human and nonhuman identity controls and why they diverge. Read the original.