Identity-first passwordless depends on covering users and machines

At a glance

What this is: Axiad’s partnership commentary says identity-first passwordless only works when enterprises can authenticate users, machines, devices, and interactions in one governed model.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM teams cannot treat human sign-in, machine certificates, and device authentication as separate problems if they want Zero Trust and passwordless to hold up operationally.

👉 Read Axiad's announcement on identity-first passwordless and machine trust

Context

Passwordless programmes often fail when they are designed around user login only. Identity-first security has to cover the full estate of humans, machines, devices, and digital interactions, because attackers rarely care whether the weakest link is a person, a laptop, or a certificate-backed service.

The governance gap is not just authentication friction. It is the mismatch between how enterprises provision, verify, and revoke access for people and how they handle non-human identities such as devices, certificates, and machine credentials, especially when those identities sit inside Zero Trust programmes.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern passwordless across both users and machines?

A: They should design passwordless as a multi-actor governance model, not a single login replacement. Human users may rely on MFA or phishing-resistant authentication, while machines and devices need certificate-backed trust, inventory, and revocation. The programme only works when each identity type has a clear lifecycle and assurance path.

Q: Why do machine identities complicate Zero Trust programmes?

A: Machine identities complicate Zero Trust because they expand the trust surface beyond human sign-in into devices, certificates, and automated interactions. If those identities are not continuously governed, an attacker can use one weak endpoint or stale credential as a trusted entry point into otherwise well-controlled environments.

Q: What breaks when certificate governance is treated as a one-time setup?

A: A one-time setup leaves renewal, revocation, and inventory drift unresolved, which means stale certificates can continue to assert trust long after the underlying device or relationship has changed. That creates hidden persistence for identities that should have lost access.

Q: How do teams know whether identity-first passwordless is actually working?

A: They should look for complete coverage across users, devices, and machine interactions, plus measurable reduction in unmanaged exceptions. If the organisation still relies on ad hoc approvals, manual certificate handling, or unsupported identity types, the programme is only partially working.

Technical breakdown

Passwordless authentication across mixed identity types

Passwordless is not one control, but a set of authentication methods that replace or reduce password dependence for different identity types. For human users, that usually means MFA, biometrics, or authenticators. For non-human identities, the equivalent control is certificate-based or device-backed authentication that can be verified without shared secrets. The hard part is orchestration: enterprises must support user sessions, machine trust, and service-to-service access without splitting policy into disconnected systems. SCIM helps with identity lifecycle updates, but it does not solve authentication design by itself.

Practical implication: map each identity type to its own passwordless pattern instead of assuming one login method will cover the whole estate.

Certificate-based device and machine identity

PKI-based identity gives machines and devices a verifiable trust anchor through certificates rather than passwords or shared tokens. That matters for endpoints, printers, laptops, mobile devices, and interaction systems such as signed email and encrypted documents. The governance issue is not issuance alone, but lifecycle control: certificate creation, renewal, revocation, and inventory all need to stay aligned with the actual device state. If they do not, a seemingly strong trust model turns into persistent access for stale or unmanaged assets.

Practical implication: tie certificate issuance and revocation to device lifecycle events, not just to onboarding workflows.

SCIM-driven identity lifecycle synchronisation

SCIM is a provisioning standard that automates changes to user identities across connected systems. In this context, its value is not in authentication but in reducing delay between identity provider changes and downstream enforcement. That helps when employees are added, modified, or removed, because access follows governance decisions more quickly. However, SCIM only covers the systems that consume it, and it does not automatically extend to every machine credential or PKI object. Identity-first programmes still need separate controls for non-human identity lifecycle management.

Practical implication: use SCIM for human and app provisioning, but pair it with explicit non-human identity lifecycle controls.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker aims to turn one weakly governed identity into broader trusted access across the organisation’s users, devices, and machine-to-machine interactions.

1. Entry occurs when attackers exploit weak or inconsistent authentication coverage across human and non-human identities, especially where machine or device trust is not explicitly verified.
2. Escalation happens when unmanaged endpoints, stale certificates, or poorly governed digital interactions provide a trusted path into broader infrastructure.
3. Impact is achieved by abusing that identity gap to move from a single insecure machine or account into wider access to applications, documents, or network resources.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Sisense breach — unauthorized GitLab access led to exfiltration of access tokens, API keys and certificates.
• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.

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

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Identity-first passwordless is really a governance problem, not an authentication feature. Enterprises often frame passwordless as a user-experience upgrade, but the real test is whether governance can extend across every identity type that can reach systems and data. If machines, devices, and interactions remain outside the same lifecycle and trust model, passwordless becomes partial coverage rather than security change.

Machine identity is the control plane that human IAM programmes keep forgetting. The article’s core tension is not whether users can authenticate more smoothly, but whether the enterprise can authenticate the non-human estate at all. Devices, certificates, and signed interactions are now part of the identity surface, and Zero Trust fails when those identities are managed as exceptions instead of governed assets.

SCIM closes a provisioning gap, but it does not equal full identity governance. Automating add, modify, and delete for users helps reduce drift, yet the same logic does not automatically apply to certificates, devices, or service-like interactions. Practitioners should treat this as a reminder that lifecycle sync and trust enforcement are different disciplines, even when they sit inside one identity programme.

Identity sprawl is becoming the dominant architecture risk in passwordless adoption. The more identity types an enterprise supports, the more likely it is to create inconsistent policy, hidden exceptions, and fragmented recovery paths. Passwordless initiatives that do not unify human and non-human identity governance will keep producing new control gaps faster than they remove old ones.

What this topic really exposes is the boundary problem between IAM and NHI governance. Human authentication, device trust, certificate lifecycle, and machine identity governance are converging in operational reality, but many teams still buy and run them as separate programmes. The implication is straightforward: practitioners need one identity architecture with multiple actor-specific control patterns, not parallel silos that only meet during incidents.

From our research:

• NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which is why machine-side identity coverage remains structurally weak.
• That visibility gap is why practitioners should also review 52 NHI Breaches Analysis for real breach patterns and failure modes.

What this signals

Identity-first programmes will increasingly be judged by non-human coverage, not just user experience. As passwordless adoption expands, the real differentiator will be whether teams can govern certificates, devices, and service-like interactions with the same discipline they apply to human access. The practical signal for readers is that human-centric IAM metrics will stop being enough on their own.

Certificate and device trust need to become first-class governance objects. When machine identities outnumber employees and remain outside the main access review process, the programme creates blind spots that look like technical debt but behave like security exposure. Teams should expect more pressure to connect PKI, inventory, and lifecycle events into one control view.

Identity architecture is moving toward actor-specific controls under one governance model. Passwordless for humans, certificate trust for machines, and lifecycle enforcement for both are converging into a single operational question: can the organisation prove who or what is trusted right now? The answer increasingly depends on whether the programme can track the full identity estate, not just the workforce.

For practitioners

• Inventory every non-human identity path Map where machines, devices, certificates, and signed interactions authenticate into the environment, then identify which of those paths are outside the normal IAM governance process.
• Bind certificate lifecycle to asset lifecycle Make certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation follow the same onboarding, change, and retirement events used for endpoints and other managed assets.
• Use SCIM for provisioning, not as a complete control model Keep SCIM for identity updates, but add separate controls for revocation, certificate rotation, and non-human authentication coverage where SCIM does not reach.
• Separate user experience metrics from trust metrics Track authentication friction for humans and trust coverage for machines as different measures, because a smoother login flow does not prove the machine estate is governed.

Key takeaways

• Passwordless only strengthens Zero Trust when it covers both human users and non-human identities.
• Machine and device identities are now large enough to create a governance gap if they sit outside lifecycle controls.
• Teams should align authentication, certificate management, and provisioning so identity trust matches operational reality.

Key terms

• Identity-First Authentication: An approach that treats identity as the primary control for access decisions rather than the network or device alone. In practice, it means users, machines, and services each need a defined trust path, lifecycle, and verification method that fits the actor type.
• Certificate Lifecycle: The governed process of issuing, renewing, rotating, and revoking certificates used to establish trust for devices and machine identities. If lifecycle control is weak, certificates can outlive the assets they protect, leaving stale trust in place after the underlying identity should have been removed.
• SCIM Provisioning: A standards-based way to automate identity changes across connected systems when users are added, updated, or removed. It reduces manual drift in provisioning, but it does not replace separate controls for machine credentials, certificate revocation, or device trust.
• Passwordless Programme: A programme that reduces or removes password dependence by using stronger authentication methods such as MFA, biometrics, authenticators, or certificate-backed trust. For NHIs and devices, passwordless only works when the organisation also governs non-human lifecycle and revocation.

Deepen your knowledge

Passwordless governance across users, devices, and machine identities is a core topic in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building a mixed identity programme from the human side outward, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Axiad: Ping Identity & Axiad: What the identity-first partnership means for your business. Read the original.