Securing non-human identities in hybrid environments

At a glance

What this is: This article explains the main types of non-human identities and how their placement in hybrid environments changes the security risks they create.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM teams cannot govern NHIs, autonomous systems, and human identities with the same assumptions when access is distributed across clouds, pipelines, containers, and edge devices.

By the numbers:

• Gartner’s 2023 Market Guide for Machine Identity Management says the number of machine identities has surged by nearly 45% over the past two years.

👉 Read Unosecur's blog on securing non-human identities in hybrid environments

Context

Non-human identities are machine credentials that let software, services, and devices authenticate and act without a person present. In hybrid environments, those credentials are spread across cloud platforms, on-premises systems, containers, CI/CD pipelines, and edge devices, which makes discovery and governance harder than in a single environment.

The core security gap is that many programmes still treat these identities as scattered implementation details rather than governed assets. Once service accounts, API keys, tokens, and device identities are embedded in runtime workflows, the real control problem becomes placement, privilege scope, and lifecycle oversight across the whole environment.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern service accounts in hybrid environments?

A: Security teams should treat service accounts as governed assets, not convenience credentials. Give each account a named owner, a single workload purpose, and a defined revocation path. Then review permissions by environment, because a credential that is acceptable in one system may be dangerously broad in another. Shared accounts should be phased out wherever attribution and offboarding matter.

Q: Why do API keys and service accounts create different risk patterns?

A: API keys usually expose integration access, while service accounts often sit deeper in infrastructure and can inherit broader permissions. That means API keys are often a leakage problem, while service accounts are often a privilege and lateral-movement problem. Teams need different controls for each, even though both are non-human identities and both require discovery, rotation, and ownership.

Q: What breaks when machine identities are not inventoried across cloud and on-prem systems?

A: Without a complete inventory, teams cannot see where credentials live, which services depend on them, or who is responsible for removing them. That breaks offboarding, weakens access reviews, and leaves hidden paths for attackers to reuse stolen secrets. In hybrid estates, missing inventory is usually the first sign that governance is lagging behind deployment.

Q: Who should own non-human identity lifecycle decisions in the enterprise?

A: Ownership should sit with the team that runs the workload, with IAM or security providing policy and oversight. If nobody owns the lifecycle, credentials persist after projects change, services are retired, or teams reorganise. Clear accountability matters because NHI governance fails fastest when access remains live after the business reason for it has disappeared.

Technical breakdown

API keys versus service accounts in machine identity governance

API keys and service accounts both support machine-to-machine access, but they behave differently in the enterprise. API keys usually represent an application calling an internal or external API, while service accounts often act as system-level identities inside infrastructure such as Active Directory, Windows services, or cloud-managed identities. The security issue is not the label but the operating context. API keys are often embedded in code or automation, while service accounts can accumulate broad permissions and be reused across teams. That combination creates hidden trust paths that are easy to overlook during reviews.

Practical implication: classify credentials by function and environment before assigning lifecycle, rotation, and access-control rules.

Hybrid and multi-cloud placement expands the NHI attack surface

Hybrid architectures multiply identity placement problems because the same business process may span on-prem systems, multiple clouds, and third-party services. Each placement introduces a different control plane, logging model, and entitlement pattern, which makes consistent governance difficult. The article’s examples show how overlooked placement can turn into exposed keys, shared accounts, or excessive permissions. In practice, the risk is not only exposure but invisibility. If teams cannot map where an NHI exists and what it can touch, least privilege becomes aspirational rather than enforceable.

Practical implication: build a single inventory of NHI placement across clouds, containers, pipelines, and edge systems.

Static versus short-lived credentials shape blast radius

The article repeatedly points to the difference between long-lived secrets and shorter-lived machine credentials. Static keys and shared service accounts create a wider attack window because compromise remains useful until the secret is rotated or revoked. Short-lived tokens and managed identities reduce exposure time, but only if the surrounding governance model is strong enough to track issuance, scope, and expiration. The control gap is often not the token itself but the assumptions around how long access remains valid and who is responsible for closing it out.

Practical implication: shorten credential lifetime where possible and tie every NHI to an owner, purpose, and revocation path.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker’s objective is to convert an overlooked machine identity into durable access that can expose data, move laterally, or compromise software delivery.

1. Entry occurs when attackers obtain exposed machine credentials such as an API key committed to a repository or a service account reused across systems.
2. Escalation follows when those credentials carry broader permissions than the workload actually needs, allowing lateral movement or access to sensitive storage and cloud resources.
3. Impact lands in the form of data theft, pipeline compromise, or environment-wide access that is hard to detect because the activity looks like legitimate machine traffic.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Reviewdog GitHub Action supply chain attack — reviewdog/action-setup GitHub Action supply chain attack exposed secrets.
• CI/CD pipeline exploitation case study — full server takeover via exposed .git directory and mismanaged CI/CD pipeline secrets.

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 placement is now a governance problem, not an inventory problem. The article shows that NHIs live across cloud, on-prem, container, CI/CD, and IoT estates, which means teams are really governing where trust is instantiated, not just how many credentials exist. That shifts the identity conversation from discovery alone to placement-aware governance. Practitioners should treat placement as part of entitlement design, not as a postscript.

Shared service accounts create trust concentration that identity teams routinely underestimate. When multiple services or teams reuse one credential, the account stops representing a single workload and starts representing an entire trust cluster. That weakens attribution, complicates offboarding, and increases lateral movement potential if one component is compromised. The practical lesson is that sharing hides ownership, and hidden ownership is a governance failure.

Static secrets create credential debt that grows faster than remediation processes can clear it. The article’s emphasis on hardcoded keys and manual rotation shows why long-lived credentials become embedded in code and operations. Once that happens, every review cycle is operating behind the reality of deployment. Practitioners should read this as lifecycle debt that compounds across repos, pipelines, and cloud tenants.

Least privilege is only meaningful when it is applied at the level of each runtime context. A credential may be technically valid but operationally overpowered if it can reach more APIs, data stores, or services than the task requires. The article’s examples make that visible in both cloud and on-prem settings. Security teams need to evaluate what the identity can reach in practice, not just what role name it carries.

Ephemeral credentials reduce exposure, but they do not remove the need for identity governance. Short-lived tokens lower the time available to attackers, yet the environment still needs ownership, scoping, monitoring, and revocation logic. Otherwise, teams simply accelerate the churn of unmanaged access. The implication is clear: speed without governance only shortens the breach window, it does not eliminate the trust problem.

From our research:

• 59.8% of organisations see value in a solution that simplifies non-human access management and introduces dynamic ephemeral credentials, according to The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
• 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts.
• For a broader control perspective, see OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 for the risks that appear when machine identities are overprivileged or poorly rotated.

What this signals

Ephemeral credentials will not fix NHI governance by themselves. With 59.8% of organisations already seeing value in simplified non-human access management and dynamic ephemeral credentials, the market is signalling demand for shorter-lived access patterns. The programme challenge is to pair that with ownership, placement, and revocation discipline, or the environment just rotates through unmanaged trust faster.

Hybrid estates are pushing identity teams toward a more explicit map of where machine trust lives and how it is removed. The teams that will scale are the ones that can align lifecycle, secrets management, and workload identity controls before their next cloud migration or platform rewrite.

For practitioners

• Create a placement inventory for every non-human identity Map service accounts, API keys, container identities, pipeline tokens, and device IDs to the systems they authenticate, the data they can reach, and the team responsible for them.
• Separate shared service accounts into workload-specific identities Replace reused credentials with workload-specific accounts where possible, then document ownership so revocation and offboarding can happen without guessing which service still depends on the account.
• Move hardcoded secrets out of code and into managed controls Scan repositories and CI/CD systems for embedded credentials, then migrate them to a secrets manager or managed identity pattern with explicit rotation and expiry handling.
• Apply environment-specific least privilege to machine access Review permissions separately for cloud, on-prem, container, and pipeline contexts so each NHI can only reach the APIs, data stores, and services its task actually requires.

Key takeaways

• Hybrid infrastructure turns NHI governance into a placement and ownership problem, not just a credential-counting problem.
• Shared service accounts, hardcoded secrets, and broad permissions create the same failure mode in different forms: hidden trust that attackers can reuse.
• The practical response is to inventory identities, shrink secret lifetime, and tie every machine credential to a clear owner and revocation path.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity: A non-human identity is a credential used by software, services, or devices rather than a person. It can be an API key, service account, token, certificate, or workload identity. The governance challenge is that these identities often outnumber human accounts and move faster than manual controls can track.
• Service Account: A service account is a machine identity used by applications, processes, or system services to perform automated tasks. It often has direct access to infrastructure or data systems, which makes ownership, privilege scope, and offboarding especially important when the workload changes or is retired.
• Secret Sprawl: Secret sprawl is the uncontrolled spread of credentials across code, pipelines, endpoints, and collaboration tools. It becomes a security problem when teams lose track of where secrets are stored, who can see them, and whether they are still valid. That invisibility creates avoidable exposure and weakens incident response.
• Machine Identity Placement: Machine identity placement is the decision about where a non-human identity lives, what systems it can touch, and which control plane governs it. In hybrid estates, placement matters because different clouds and internal systems apply different logging, ownership, and lifecycle rules.

What's in the full article

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

• Examples of each NHI type in cloud, on-premises, CI/CD, container, and IoT environments
• The article's own incident examples showing how exposed keys and shared service accounts are exploited
• Practical placement guidance for teams deciding where machine identities should live and who should manage them

👉 Unosecur's full post covers NHI types, placement considerations, and incident examples in more detail

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity security 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.