Managing non-human identities requires ownership, review, and least privilege

At a glance

What this is: This is a practitioner-focused analysis of how to govern non-human identities through ownership, review, automation, and least privilege.

Why it matters: It matters because NHI sprawl turns routine automation into unmanaged access unless IAM teams can assign accountability and continuously reduce privilege.

By the numbers:

• Non-human identities in the digital ecosystem outnumber human identities by as much as 20 to 1.
• 100% of organizations find excessive permissions during access reviews.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.

👉 Read CyberArk's analysis of strategies for managing non-human identities

Context

Non-human identity governance is the control problem behind modern automation. Service accounts, bots, and APIs are created to connect systems and accelerate work, but they often outlive the task they were meant to perform or accumulate access without a clear human owner. In practice, that leaves IAM teams dealing with identities that are everywhere in the stack and nowhere in the ownership model.

CyberArk's discussion, originally published by Zilla Security, fits a familiar pattern: the basic controls that work for human users do not scale cleanly to machine identities. That is why the operational question is not whether NHIs exist, but whether organisations can inventory them, assign accountability, review access regularly, and keep privilege aligned with function. For teams already dealing with broad NHI sprawl, this is a typical starting point rather than an edge case.

Key questions

Q: How should organisations govern non-human identities across their environment?

A: Start by inventorying every machine identity, assigning a human owner, and tying each one to a business purpose. Then apply routine access review, least privilege, and revocation for stale accounts. NHIs should be governed as accountable identities, not as background infrastructure that can be left unmanaged.

Q: Why do non-human identities create more access risk than many teams expect?

A: NHIs often outnumber human identities and are created to keep systems connected, which makes them easy to overlook. Because they frequently receive broad permissions and keep running after the original task changes, they can become orphaned, over-privileged, and difficult to audit.

Q: What is the difference between access review and least privilege for NHIs?

A: Access review checks whether the current permissions are still justified, while least privilege sets the minimum access an identity should have in the first place. Both are needed: review removes drift, and least privilege limits the blast radius if an NHI is compromised.

Q: When should security teams remove or rotate NHI credentials?

A: Remove or rotate credentials when the workflow changes, the owner changes, the identity is no longer needed, or the access cannot be justified. For high-risk NHIs, periodic rotation should be routine rather than exceptional, because stale credentials are a common path to compromise.

Technical breakdown

Why NHI ownership is the first control layer

Non-human identities do not manage themselves, and accountability cannot be inferred from the system that created them. In many environments, the person who provisions a service account or API credential is not the person who should approve its ongoing use. The technical issue is ownership mapping: each identity needs a human accountable for business justification, review, and retirement. Without that link, access reviews become checkbox exercises and orphaned identities accumulate. Automated discovery helps, but the control objective is not inventory alone. It is making every machine identity traceable to a responsible owner who can answer why it exists and when it should be removed.

Practical implication: Map every NHI to a named owner and require ownership transfer when the business role changes.

How access reviews expose NHI sprawl and orphaned access

Access reviews are one of the few controls that can surface machine identities that no longer match their original purpose. The mechanism is straightforward: compare current entitlements against intended function, then challenge any account whose access cannot be justified. Because NHIs often operate continuously, their entitlements are easy to forget and hard to spot without automation. Regular review cycles also reveal patterns such as duplicate service accounts, stale integrations, and access granted for one-off testing that was never removed. For NHIs, review frequency matters because the control is only useful if it happens before dormant access becomes a standing risk.

Practical implication: Automate quarterly or more frequent reviews for NHIs and require business justification for every exception.

Least privilege for service accounts and bots

Least privilege means an NHI receives only the permissions required for a specific task, nothing broader. In machine environments, privilege drift is common because permissions are added to keep pipelines moving and then left in place after the original use case changes. That creates unnecessary blast radius if the credential is exposed or misused. The technical fix is to couple permission scoping with lifecycle controls such as rotation, revocation, and periodic revalidation. For bots and service accounts, privilege should be treated as temporary and task-specific, not as a permanent operating condition.

Practical implication: Reduce service-account permissions to task scope and revalidate them whenever the workflow changes.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.
• Azure Key Vault privilege escalation exposure — Azure Key Vault Contributor role misconfiguration enabled privilege escalation.

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

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Ownership is the missing control plane for NHI governance. The article correctly treats identification of the human behind the machine identity as the starting point, because accountability is what turns an inventory into a governance process. Without named ownership, no one is responsible for review, exception handling, or retirement. That means the first governance milestone is not tooling coverage but enforceable accountability for every NHI.

Access reviews for NHIs should be treated as detection, not administration. Machine identities routinely accumulate access that no longer matches their function, and quarterly review cycles are one of the few ways to expose that drift. The practical lesson is that review findings are security signals, not paperwork outputs. Organisations that cannot explain every entitlement are already carrying avoidable identity risk.

Least privilege is still the right model, but only if it is operationalised continuously. The article's strongest point is that machine identities should not be exempt from the security logic applied to human identities. In NHI environments, least privilege breaks down when permissions are never revalidated after workflow changes. The field should treat privilege drift as an expected condition and build governance around it.

Automation should reduce review fatigue, not replace governance judgement. AI and machine learning can help surface unusual access patterns and excessive permissions, but they do not remove the need for business accountability. The best use of automation is to shorten the distance between discovery and decision. Practitioners should use tooling to scale review and detection, then keep humans responsible for approving access and removal decisions.

From our research:

• 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Our research also finds: 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
• Forward look: See Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs for the lifecycle controls that close the gap between discovery and revocation.

What this signals

Ephemeral access without lifecycle discipline creates trust debt. Teams that add automation without tightening ownership, review, and revocation simply move the problem faster. With 90% of IT leaders saying properly managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust implementation, the programme risk is no longer visibility alone but control fatigue. Align the operating model to NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs so review and removal become repeatable.

NHI ownership will become a board-level audit question, not a tooling question. Once identities are created by pipelines, scripts, and integrations, the absence of a human owner is itself a governance failure. Practitioners should expect auditors and risk owners to ask who can approve, revoke, and explain every machine identity, especially where access crosses cloud, vendor, or third-party boundaries. Map that expectation to the Top 10 NHI Issues and use it to reset accountability.

For practitioners

• Create an NHI ownership register Record the business owner, technical owner, and review cadence for every service account, bot, API credential, and integration identity. Reassign ownership when roles change so orphaned access does not persist.
• Automate regular NHI access reviews Run scheduled reviews for machine identities on a quarterly or shorter cycle, and require a business justification for each entitlement that remains in place. Flag identities with no active owner for immediate remediation.
• Enforce task-scoped least privilege Limit each NHI to the minimum permissions required for its current workflow, then revalidate access whenever the application, pipeline, or integration changes. Remove access that exists only for historical convenience.
• Track stale and duplicate machine identities Look for accounts created for integrations, testing, or automation that are no longer in use. Prioritise removal of identities that have no current workflow dependency or that share privileges with another account.

Key takeaways

• Non-human identity governance fails when ownership is unclear, because no one is accountable for review, revocation, or exception handling.
• Machine identities accumulate risk quickly, and access reviews consistently reveal excessive permissions that should not be left in place.
• The right response is operational discipline: assign owners, enforce least privilege, and make NHI lifecycle controls routine rather than exceptional.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity: A non-human identity is a credentialed digital entity used by software, services, or automation rather than a person. It includes service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, bots, workloads, and AI agents. The governance problem is that these identities often multiply faster than human accounts and are easier to overlook.
• Identity Ownership: Identity ownership is the assignment of a responsible human for each identity's purpose, access, review, and retirement. For non-human identities, ownership must be explicit because the creator is not always the right person to approve ongoing access. Without ownership, review and revocation become inconsistent and slow.
• Privilege Drift: Privilege drift is the gradual expansion or persistence of permissions beyond what an identity currently needs. In NHI environments, drift usually happens when workflows change but entitlements do not. It increases exposure because the identity keeps access long after the business justification has weakened or disappeared.
• Access Review: Access review is the periodic evaluation of whether an identity's permissions are still justified. For non-human identities, the review must check business purpose, current owner, and actual usage, not just whether the account still exists. It is one of the clearest ways to find orphaned or over-privileged machine access.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI ownership, access review, and least privilege are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building an NHI governance programme from a similar starting point, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by CyberArk: Strategies for Managing Non-Human Identities. Read the original.