TL;DR: As enterprises scale automation, APIs, service accounts, bots, and CI/CD pipelines are operating with broad permissions and long-lived credentials, creating a widening machine identity governance gap, according to SecurEnds. Least privilege, ownership, rotation, and recurring review are now baseline controls, not optional hardening.
At a glance
What this is: This is an analysis of why non-human identities have become a baseline governance problem, with SecurEnds arguing that excessive permissions, long-lived credentials and poor ownership are now central enterprise risks.
Why it matters: IAM, PAM and cloud security teams need to treat service accounts, API tokens and CI/CD identities as governed assets because their persistence and privilege directly shape blast radius, visibility and compliance.
Context
Non-human identity sprawl is the growth of machine accounts, credentials and workloads faster than the governance applied to them. In this article, the core problem is not automation itself but the steady accumulation of broad permissions, long-lived secrets and unclear ownership across APIs, bots, service accounts and CI/CD pipelines.
For IAM and security teams, that creates a control gap in lifecycle management, access scoping and review. Least privilege is presented here as the baseline because these identities are both numerous and operationally persistent, which means every excess entitlement increases the blast radius of compromise.
The governance issue is especially acute in cloud and DevOps environments where machine identities operate continuously. When machine access is not explicitly owned, rotated and re-certified, visibility and compliance degrade at the same time as exposure expands.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when non-human identities are not included in least privilege reviews?
A: When non-human identities are left out of least privilege reviews, access tends to accumulate quietly across service accounts, API keys, tokens, and automation workflows. That creates excess privilege, harder incident response, and a wider blast radius if credentials are exposed or misused. The result is often faster lateral movement and weaker accountability when something goes wrong.
Q: Why do long-lived machine credentials create more risk than short-lived access?
A: Long-lived machine credentials create more risk because they can be copied, reused, and forgotten across pipelines and infrastructure. Short-lived access reduces exposure, but only if it is tied to policy, ownership, and revocation at the point of use. Without that, the credential may still outlive the system or workload it was meant to protect.
Q: What are the signs that machine identity management is failing in an organisation?
A: Common signs include incomplete inventory, spreadsheet based tracking, manual renewal processes, unclear ownership, and repeated certificate expiry events. Another signal is when teams struggle to audit where machine identities exist or cannot automate lifecycle actions at scale. If operational teams keep reacting to expiring certificates instead of governing identity lifecycles proactively, the control environment is already under strain.
Q: How should security teams prioritise machine identity cleanup?
A: Start with identities that combine high privilege, continuous operation and weak ownership. Those accounts create the largest blast radius because they are both hard to notice and highly capable once compromised, especially in cloud and CI/CD environments.
Technical breakdown
Why machine identity sprawl creates a standing-access problem
Non-human identities are not just more numerous than human accounts in many enterprises, they also behave differently. They are often created for one workflow but remain active for years, with permissions layered on over time to keep automation running. That produces standing access, meaning access that persists whether or not it is still justified. In identity terms, the problem is not only excess privilege, but privilege that outlives the operational need that created it. Once a service account, API token or CI/CD runner becomes a default dependency, governance tends to lag behind the workload.
Practical implication: treat machine accounts as lifecycle assets, not permanent infrastructure defaults.
How long-lived secrets widen the compromise window
Many non-human identities depend on static API keys, embedded credentials and long-lived tokens. These credentials are attractive because they are simple to deploy, but they create a wide compromise window when they are leaked, copied or reused. If a secret remains valid for months or years, an attacker who finds it can return repeatedly without tripping a natural expiry boundary. That is why secret rotation and short-lived credentials are not cosmetic controls. They directly reduce the time an exposed credential can be abused and limit how long an attacker can rely on stolen machine access.
Practical implication: shorten credential lifetime wherever operationally possible and remove static secrets from persistent workflows.
Why ownership and entitlement review determine whether least privilege works
Least privilege for non-human identities only works when someone owns the identity, understands its business purpose and can review whether the granted scope still matches the task. Without ownership, review becomes guesswork and dormant identities stay active. Without recurring entitlement validation, permissions expand silently as teams add exceptions to preserve availability. In cloud environments, that creates hidden lateral movement potential because over-scoped machine identities can touch multiple resources, environments and data sets. The issue is not simply access volume, but the absence of a reliable governance loop around machine access.
Practical implication: assign every machine identity an owner and make recurring entitlement review a mandatory control, not a clean-up task.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker seeks durable machine access that can be reused to reach cloud resources, manipulate infrastructure or exfiltrate data without relying on a human account.
- Entry begins when attackers obtain a leaked API key, token or service account secret from code, config files or other exposed locations.
- Credential abuse follows when the compromised machine identity is reused with its existing privileges and no immediate expiry boundary blocks it.
- Escalation occurs when the identity already has broad access to cloud resources, CI/CD systems or application data, allowing movement across environments.
- Impact is achieved through persistence, data access, infrastructure changes or supply chain manipulation that continues until the identity is revoked or rotated.
Breaches seen in the wild
- reviewdog Action compromise 2025: A stolen maintainer token poisoned reviewdog/action-setup, leaking CI secrets including the tj-actions bot token used in the next attack.
- Dropbox Sign breach 2024: A compromised back-end service account gave attackers Dropbox Sign customer data, including API keys, OAuth tokens and MFA information.
Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Least privilege for non-human identities is no longer a hardening measure, it is the baseline governance model. Machine identities now sit inside core delivery paths, so excess privilege becomes an operational design flaw rather than a marginal risk. When APIs, bots and service accounts run continuously, the difference between scoped and unscoped access is the difference between contained failure and enterprise-wide blast radius.
Long-lived machine credentials create trust debt. Static keys and tokens remain valid long after the original deployment context has changed, which means the security state of the identity drifts away from the current business need. That drift is what attackers exploit, and it is why rotation, expiry and federation matter as governance primitives rather than hygiene tasks.
Ownership is the missing control plane for non-human identity governance. An identity without a named owner is effectively outside the review loop, even if it is technically inventoried. The practical consequence is that dormant service accounts and over-scoped automation credentials remain active because nobody can prove they should be removed.
Machine identity blast radius: overprivileged service accounts and pipeline identities turn one leaked secret into cross-environment compromise. That concept captures the real governance failure in this article: machine access is not just present, it is often broad enough to amplify every credential mistake. Practitioners should evaluate entitlement scope as a blast-radius issue, not only an access issue.
Compliance pressure is now following the control failure, not leading it. Frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HIPAA increasingly expect organisations to be able to explain who owns machine access, how it is reviewed and when it is retired. The field is moving toward machine identity governance as a standard audit expectation, and programmes that still treat it as a niche DevOps concern will keep missing the control gap.
From our research library:
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Read next: Service Account Security Guide
What this signals
Machine identity governance is moving from a niche DevOps concern to a core IAM control. As automation spreads across cloud and software delivery, the programme question is no longer whether machine identities exist, but whether each one has a justified scope, an owner and a retirement path. Teams that still inventory identities without enforcing lifecycle discipline will continue to accumulate hidden risk.
Least privilege for non-human identities is really a blast-radius strategy. The important question is not whether a service account can do its job, but how far that account can move if its secret is exposed. In practice, entitlement scope, credential lifetime and review cadence are the three variables that decide whether compromise stays local or becomes systemic.
For practitioners
- Assign an owner to every machine identity Record a named business owner, technical custodian and lifecycle path for every service account, API token, bot and CI/CD identity. Treat unowned identities as exceptions that must be reviewed and either justified or removed.
- Replace static secrets with short-lived credentials Prioritise ephemeral tokens, workload federation and temporary credentials for identities that do not need long-term secret persistence. Remove embedded keys from pipelines and application configs wherever replacement is feasible.
- Scope machine permissions to specific resources Remove wildcard and broad administrative grants from non-human identities and constrain them to the exact applications, cloud resources or environments they need to run.
- Automate recurring entitlement review Build certification and review cycles for service accounts, API keys and workload identities so unused access, dormant accounts and excessive privileges are detected before they become permanent.
- Continuously monitor machine identity activity Track token usage, service account access patterns and privilege escalation attempts so abnormal behaviour is visible before a leaked credential becomes persistent access.
Key takeaways
- Non-human identities now sit at the centre of enterprise automation, and their access model often matters more than the automation itself.
- The main risk is not only the number of machine identities, but the combination of broad permissions, long-lived secrets and unclear ownership.
- Programmes that assign owners, shorten credential lifetime and recertify machine access regularly will reduce blast radius and improve auditability.
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 and MITRE ATT&CK address the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | The article centers on broad permissions granted to machine identities beyond operational need. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | Static API keys and tokens are highlighted as a key reason compromise persists. | |
| NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Dormant service accounts and inactive identities are described as remaining active indefinitely. | |
| Recommendation — Audit non-human identity entitlements and remove permissions that exceed the task scope. Replace long-lived machine secrets with short-lived credentials wherever the workload permits. Retire unused machine identities through lifecycle offboarding and disablement. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | The article emphasizes rotation and management of machine authenticators. |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticator management controls to rotate and revoke non-human credentials on a defined schedule. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | Least privilege and recurring entitlement review map directly to access authorization control. |
| Recommendation — Review and tighten entitlement scopes so machine access stays aligned to business need. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006; TA0008 — Credential Access; Lateral Movement | The threat model in the article is stolen machine credentials enabling cross-environment movement. |
| Recommendation — Map leaked machine credentials to credential access and lateral movement detections in your monitoring pipeline. | ||
Key terms
- Non-Human Identity (NHI): A digital identity assigned to a non-human entity such as a software application, service account, API key, bot, machine, or AI agent that enables it to authenticate and interact with systems without direct human involvement. NHIs now outnumber human identities in most enterprises by 25 to 50 times.
- Least Privilege: A security principle requiring that every identity, human or non-human, is granted only the minimum permissions necessary to perform its function. Least privilege is the single most effective control for reducing NHI blast radius.
- Machine Identity Governance: Machine Identity Governance is the discipline of controlling how non-human identities are created, used, monitored, and retired. It covers service accounts, API keys, certificates, tokens, workloads, and automation identities, with policies for ownership, lifecycle, least privilege, rotation, attestation, and auditability across cloud, application, and infrastructure environments.
- Long-Lived Secret: A long-lived secret is a credential, token, API key, or certificate that remains valid for an extended period without frequent renewal. In NHI environments, it creates durable exposure because one leaked secret can keep granting access long after the original use case has changed.
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on June 24, 2026.
Updated on October 6, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org