Machine identity management and PKI are now operational priorities

At a glance

What this is: This is a GlobalSign blog post arguing that machine identity management has moved from a technical back-end concern to an operational security priority, with PKI at the centre of trust and lifecycle control.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and infrastructure teams increasingly govern non-human access through certificates and related trust controls, and weak lifecycle management leaves machine identities exposed to misuse and persistence.

👉 Read GlobalSign's post on machine identity management and PKI

Context

Machine identity management is the discipline of controlling how systems, services, and devices prove who they are and what they are allowed to access. The article frames PKI as the trust layer behind that control, especially where certificates, trust chains, and revocation determine whether machine access remains valid.

For IAM and security teams, the governance problem is not whether machine identities exist. It is whether certificate issuance, renewal, revocation, and policy enforcement are managed as a lifecycle with clear ownership. That is the practical difference between a trust posture that can be operated and one that is only documented.

Key questions

Q: How should teams govern certificates as part of machine identity management?

A: Treat certificates as machine identities with owners, lifecycle states, and policy controls. Build inventory, automate renewal, enforce revocation, and connect certificate governance to IAM, secrets, and incident response so trust relationships are visible and manageable.

Q: Why do machine identities challenge zero trust architectures?

A: Because zero trust depends on continuous verification, while many machine identities are issued once and then trusted for far too long. If certificates and keys are broad, stale, or hard to revoke, the architecture becomes trust-on-first-use in practice. Strong machine identity governance is what makes zero trust believable for non-human access.

Q: What breaks when certificate renewal is managed manually?

A: Manual renewal breaks consistency, especially when large numbers of services, devices, and applications depend on the same trust pattern. Expiry becomes an availability risk, but the deeper issue is governance drift, because teams lose certainty about which identities are active, owned, and still legitimate.

Q: What is the difference between certificate encryption and certificate governance?

A: Encryption protects data in transit or at rest, while governance controls who can issue, use, rotate and revoke certificates. A certificate can be technically strong and still create risk if ownership is unclear or the lifecycle is unmanaged. Governance is what keeps trust from becoming sprawl.

Technical breakdown

PKI as the trust anchor for machine identities

Public key infrastructure binds a machine identity to a cryptographic certificate that can be validated by other systems. In practice, the certificate, issuing authority, and trust chain together establish whether a workload, service, or device should be accepted. That makes PKI less about encryption in isolation and more about continuous proof of identity at machine speed. When certificates are unmanaged, the trust layer becomes brittle because systems keep accepting identities that no longer reflect reality.

Practical implication: Map every machine identity to its issuing chain and ownership so certificate trust can be governed as an identity control, not an infrastructure afterthought.

Certificate lifecycle management and renewal pressure

Certificate management only works when issuance, renewal, replacement, and revocation are treated as one operational cycle. The article points to the growing importance of automation because manual handling does not scale across modern application estates, device fleets, and service connections. Shorter validity periods make this more urgent, because the operational cost of missed renewal rises as trust windows shrink. Lifecycle failure is not just an outage risk. It is also a governance failure that leaves stale trust in place.

Practical implication: Build automated renewal and revocation workflows with explicit ownership for every certificate class, especially where expiry would interrupt business-critical services.

Why machine identity governance belongs in IAM and Zero Trust

Machine identities are part of identity governance, even when they do not involve a human user. In Zero Trust environments, trust should be established continuously and narrowly, which means certificate-backed identities need policy, review, and visibility just like human accounts do. The article’s broader point is that PKI supports the identity plane only when it is integrated into access decisions, asset inventory, and operational monitoring. Without that integration, certificates become isolated technical artefacts rather than governed identities.

Practical implication: Treat machine identities as first-class IAM objects and align PKI operations with Zero Trust policy, access review, and asset visibility.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker aims to reuse valid machine trust to access systems without triggering normal authentication failures or rapid detection.

1. entry: A machine identity is introduced through certificate issuance or provisioning, creating the initial trust relationship between a workload, service, or device and the systems that rely on it.
2. escalation: If lifecycle controls are weak, the identity retains access beyond its intended use window, allowing stale credentials or certificates to keep authenticating successfully.
3. impact: Persistent machine trust expands the blast radius of compromise because attackers can reuse valid identities to move through connected systems and services.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Sisense breach — unauthorized GitLab access led to exfiltration of access tokens, API keys and certificates.
• Coupang Signing Key Breach — Unrevoked signing key credentials expose 33.7 million records after employee offboarding failure at Coupang.

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

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Machine identity governance is now inseparable from PKI operations. The article reflects a broader shift in which certificates are not just transport-layer artefacts but governed identities with owners, lifecycles, and access consequences. That means IAM programmes must stop treating PKI as a separate technical silo. The practitioner implication is clear: if a certificate cannot be assigned, reviewed, and retired, it is not governed.

Certificate lifecycle control is the real control surface, not certificate possession alone. A valid certificate can still become a liability if renewal, revocation, and ownership are not continuously maintained. This is where many identity programmes underperform: they focus on issuance and forget retirement. The practitioner implication is to evaluate trust by state transitions, not by whether a certificate was once properly issued.

Machine identities should be managed as part of the same access model that governs human and service access. The same governance logic that applies to joiner-mover-leaver processes also applies to certificates used by workloads and devices. If an identity can authenticate, it can create risk, regardless of whether a person is behind it. The practitioner implication is to align certificate controls with IAM, IGA, and PAM ownership models.

Zero Trust only works when machine trust is continuously revalidated. PKI supports Zero Trust architecture, but only when trust decisions remain current and policy-driven. Static certificates without visibility create a trust gap that Zero Trust is supposed to remove. The practitioner implication is to connect certificate inventories, revocation status, and policy enforcement into one operational view.

Lifecycle fragmentation is the hidden scaling problem in machine identity programmes. Organisations often accumulate multiple certificate processes, tools, and ownership paths over time, which fragments governance even when individual controls look sound. That fragmentation makes automation harder and auditability weaker. The practitioner implication is to rationalise certificate operations before scale turns inconsistency into control failure.

From our research:

• The average estimated time to remediate a leaked secret is 27 days, despite 75% of organisations expressing strong confidence in their secrets management capabilities, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
• Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices for secrets management, exposing a significant developer behaviour gap.
• That gap is why practitioners should compare machine identity governance with Ultimate Guide to NHIs , What are Non-Human Identities and align certificate controls with identity lifecycle ownership.

What this signals

Machine identity programmes will keep failing at the seams unless teams operationalise certificate ownership the way they operationalise human access ownership. The governance gap is not conceptual. It shows up when no one can answer who owns a certificate, who renews it, and who can revoke it when trust changes.

With 44% of developers following secrets-management best practices, per The State of Secrets in AppSec, machine identity hygiene cannot depend on developer memory or ad hoc operations. Identity teams need lifecycle controls that are explicit, measurable, and audit-ready.

Certificate sprawl is becoming a control problem, not just an inventory problem. The more fragmented the trust estate becomes, the more likely revocation, renewal, and policy exceptions drift outside normal governance. That is why machine identity visibility now belongs in the same operational conversation as IAM, PAM, and Zero Trust.

For practitioners

• Inventory all machine certificates and owners Create a complete register of certificates, issuing authorities, renewal dates, and service owners so no machine identity exists without accountable stewardship.
• Automate renewal and revocation workflows Move renewal, replacement, and revocation into controlled automation with exception handling for critical systems and clear escalation before expiry or compromise.
• Tie PKI to IAM governance records Link certificates to asset inventory, service ownership, and access policy so machine identities are visible in the same governance process used for other identities.
• Review certificate sprawl across environments Identify duplicated certificate authorities, unmanaged issuance paths, and inconsistent renewal patterns across cloud, application, and device environments, then consolidate control points.

Key takeaways

• Machine identity governance is a lifecycle problem, not just a certificate problem.
• When renewal and revocation are weak, valid trust becomes a persistence mechanism.
• IAM teams need visibility, ownership, and automation before certificate sprawl outpaces control.

Key terms

• Machine Identity: A machine identity is a non-human identity used by a workload, service, device, or application to authenticate and access resources. It usually relies on certificates, keys, or tokens. In governance terms, it must have an owner, a lifecycle, and a revocation path just like any other access-bearing identity.
• Public Key Infrastructure: Public key infrastructure is the trust system that issues, validates, and revokes certificates used to prove identity. It links cryptographic proof to an accountable authority, which makes it central to machine trust. In practice, PKI only works when the certificate lifecycle is managed as an operational control.
• Certificate Lifecycle: Certificate lifecycle is the full path from issuance to renewal, replacement, and retirement. It is the operational unit that determines whether trust remains valid over time. Weak lifecycle management creates stale credentials, failed renewals, and trust persistence that can outlast the intended access window.
• Zero Trust Architecture: Zero Trust Architecture is an assume-breach model that requires continuous verification instead of implicit trust. For machine identities, that means certificates and related trust signals must stay current and policy-driven. If certificate state is stale, the architecture still accepts identities that should no longer be trusted.

What's in the full article

GlobalSign's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• How certificate automation is used across machine identity estates to reduce renewal failure and operational drift
• The article's framing of PKI as a business trust layer, not only a technical encryption mechanism
• The specific reasons machine identity management is becoming harder as certificate volumes and renewal pressure increase
• Practical examples of why organisations must align certificate lifecycle control with broader identity governance

👉 The full GlobalSign post covers the PKI and machine identity context behind this governance shift.

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 building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.