Securing non-human identities in hybrid environments

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of non-human identity types in hybrid environments, showing that API keys, service accounts, container identities, and pipeline tokens create hidden access paths when placement and governance are inconsistent.

Why it matters: IAM, PAM, and NHI teams need a placement view of machine identities because visibility gaps and overly broad permissions turn routine automation credentials into lateral-movement and exposure risks.

By the numbers:

• The number of machine identities has surged by nearly 45% over the past two years, according to Gartner’s 2023 Market Guide for Machine Identity Management cited by Unosecur.
• Mismanaged machine credentials are becoming one of the top causes of unauthorized access in hybrid cloud infrastructures, according to Deloitte’s 2023 Global Security Report cited by Unosecur.
• PwC’s 2023 report found that 60% of organizations experienced at least one incident where leaked or misconfigured A2A credentials were exploited by attackers.
• Overprivileged service accounts account for nearly 40% of lateral movement in on-prem breaches, according to Deloitte’s 2024 Global Cyber Executive Briefing cited by Unosecur.

👉 Read Unosecur's analysis of securing non-human identities in hybrid environments

Context

Hybrid environments make non-human identity placement harder to track because the same organisation may be running workloads on-premises, in one cloud, and across several integration points at once. In that setup, service accounts, API keys, container identities, CI/CD tokens, and IoT device credentials are all legitimate, but they are not governed the same way and are often stored in different places.

The governance gap is not the existence of these credentials, but the fact that teams often cannot answer where they live, who owns them, or what privileges they still need. That matters because machine credentials behave like access control infrastructure, and when placement is unclear, lifecycle control and visibility break down before an attacker ever needs to be clever.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when non-human identities are not mapped to their actual runtime placement?

A: Discovery becomes incomplete, ownership stays unclear, and security teams cannot reliably apply the right controls to the right credential. In hybrid environments, that means some NHIs remain outside vaulting, rotation, or access review workflows even though they still have live privileges. The practical result is hidden access that persists longer than the business expects.

Q: Why do service accounts increase lateral movement risk in enterprise environments?

A: Service accounts often connect multiple systems, so they sit at the center of trust relationships that humans never see directly. If those credentials are reused, over-scoped, or poorly rotated, they can provide a bridge across environments. The risk is not the account type alone, but the hidden connectivity it enables across production workflows.

Q: What are the signs that NHI lifecycle governance is failing in hybrid cloud?

A: The clearest signs are stale accounts that remain active after migrations, sync identities that still bridge multiple environments, and service accounts whose permissions no longer match their workload. Those conditions show that offboarding and recertification are not keeping pace with machine change.

Q: How should teams govern short-lived tokens without assuming they are low risk?

A: Short-lived tokens should be governed as issued trust, not as harmless temporary access. Teams need controls for who can mint them, what scope they carry, where they are stored, and how they are revoked when the workload changes. Expiry reduces exposure time, but it does not replace ownership or lifecycle management.

Technical breakdown

Why hybrid placement makes NHI sprawl hard to govern

Hybrid placement means non-human identities are distributed across systems that do not share a single control plane. An API key may live in application code or a secrets vault, while a service account may be bound to an internal directory, a cloud workload, or a container runtime. The technical problem is that each identity type authenticates differently, has a different trust boundary, and is usually owned by a different team. Without a consolidated inventory, organisations lose the ability to apply consistent lifecycle controls, and those gaps become persistent access paths rather than isolated exceptions.

Practical implication: Build an inventory that classifies every machine credential by location, owner, and authentication method before trying to standardise controls.

How API keys and service accounts create different exposure paths

API keys generally authenticate to external or internal interfaces, while service accounts usually operate as system-level identities inside the environment. That difference matters because an exposed API key is often a direct entry point into a platform integration, whereas a compromised service account can sit deeper in the trust chain and unlock internal systems or jobs. In both cases, the risk is amplified by standing privilege, reuse, and weak ownership. The source article’s examples show that the same NHI label does not mean the same security pattern, so governance has to follow the credential’s function, not just its type.

Practical implication: Separate controls for externally exposed API keys and internally scoped service accounts instead of treating them as one credential class.

Why short-lived tokens still need lifecycle governance

Short-lived credentials reduce exposure time, but they do not remove the need for governance because the issuance path, privilege scope, and storage location still matter. CI/CD tokens, container identities, and cloud API credentials are often created automatically, used briefly, and then forgotten by the teams that depend on them. That creates a false sense of safety: the token may expire, but the permissions model behind it, the logs that record it, and the systems that can mint it again may all remain overpowered. In practice, short lifetime is a control, not a governance strategy.

Practical implication: Treat ephemeral credentials as one control layer and keep discovery, scoping, and offboarding in place around them.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants to turn hidden machine trust into durable access that can reach data, internal systems, or deployment pipelines.

1. Entry begins when an exposed API key, shared service account, or misconfigured pipeline token provides access to a hybrid workload or integration point.
2. Credential access or reuse then allows the attacker to authenticate as the machine identity rather than as a human user, which bypasses many traditional alerting assumptions.
3. Escalation follows when the credential carries broader permissions than the workload needs, enabling access to adjacent systems, internal data stores, or deployment paths.
4. Impact occurs when the attacker uses that machine trust to move laterally, exfiltrate data, or alter software and operational processes.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Dropbox Sign breach 2024: A compromised back-end service account gave attackers Dropbox Sign customer data, including API keys, OAuth tokens and MFA information.
• OneLogin API flaw (CVE-2025-59363): A OneLogin API flaw exposed OIDC client secrets to anyone with an API key, including vendors (CVE-2025-59363); fixed with no customer impact.

Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 150+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Hybrid NHI placement is now a governance problem, not an inventory problem. The article shows that organisations already know NHIs exist, but still struggle to place them consistently across cloud, on-premises, container, and edge environments. That means the failure is structural: ownership, scope, and storage are fragmented by design, so visibility alone will not fix the exposure. Practitioners need to treat placement as a governance control, not a discovery exercise.

API keys and service accounts should not be governed as interchangeable assets. The source makes clear that API keys, service accounts, container identities, and pipeline tokens serve different technical purposes and fail in different ways. A one-size-fits-all policy creates blind spots because an externally exposed integration key and an internal service account do not share the same blast radius. The practical conclusion is that identity programmes must classify machine credentials by function and trust boundary before assigning controls.

Overprivileged machine identities are a direct lateral-movement enabler. The article’s on-prem and cloud examples both show that the danger comes from what the credential can do after it is found or compromised. When a service account is shared, reused, or left with broad rights, it becomes a pivot point rather than a task-specific identity. That makes privilege scope the decisive governance variable for NHI programmes.

Central vaulting without lifecycle enforcement creates trust debt. The article recommends centralised identity governance and secrets tools, but those controls only help if teams also remove stale access and keep permissions aligned to current use. Otherwise, the organisation centralises storage while leaving old entitlements intact. Practitioners should see vaulting as the control surface, not the control outcome.

Ephemeral credentials still depend on durable policy. Short-lived tokens, container identities, and CI/CD secrets can look safer because they disappear quickly, yet they are often reissued automatically under the same weak assumptions. That means expiry reduces risk window but does not solve ownership, privilege, or misplacement. The concept here is ephemeral credential trust debt: short-lived access that still accumulates unmanaged trust because the surrounding governance model does not reset with the token. Teams should govern issuance and revocation as carefully as they govern duration.

From our research library:

• NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Read next: Ultimate Guide to NHIs

What this signals

Ephemeral credential trust debt: short-lived machine identities do not eliminate governance debt if the organisation cannot prove who issued them, where they live, and when they should be revoked. The more hybrid the environment becomes, the more likely it is that temporary access outlasts the workflow that created it.

Teams should expect the most difficult NHI problems to show up at the seams between cloud, on-premises, and pipeline automation, where different ownership models collide. That is where inventory, offboarding, and privilege scope all fail at once.

For practitioners

• Classify every NHI by placement Map each service account, API key, container identity, and pipeline token to its runtime location, owner, and trust boundary so that governance can follow the credential instead of the platform.
• Split policies for internal and external machine access Apply different controls to external API integrations and internal service accounts because their exposure paths, blast radius, and revocation needs are not the same.
• Remove shared service account usage Replace shared credentials with identity-specific ownership and separate entitlements so a compromise in one workload cannot automatically extend across the environment.
• Enforce short-lived credentials with offboarding Pair token expiry with explicit revocation, rotation, and decommissioning workflows so short-lived access does not become long-lived trust by default.

Key takeaways

• The main governance issue is not that machine identities exist, but that hybrid placement fragments ownership, visibility, and control.
• API keys, service accounts, container identities, and pipeline tokens fail differently, so they need distinct policy treatment rather than a single blanket rule.
• Short-lived access still needs lifecycle enforcement, because expiry does not remove the risk created by shared, overprivileged, or mis-placed credentials.

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.
• Service Account: A special-purpose account used by applications, automated tools, or services rather than a human user to interact with systems, APIs, and infrastructure. Service accounts are a primary category of NHI and one of the most frequently exploited attack vectors.
• API Key: A unique identifier used to authenticate a software application or service when calling an API. API keys are static, long-lived credentials and a major source of secrets sprawl. In 2024, over 50 million leaked API keys were found on the dark web.
• Secrets Management: The discipline of securely storing, distributing, rotating, and auditing secrets across an organisation's systems and pipelines, typically implemented via a centralised secrets vault such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Akeyless.

What's in the full article

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

• The article’s credential-by-credential walk-through of API keys, service accounts, container identities, pipeline tokens, and IoT device IDs
• The specific cloud, on-premises, DevOps, and edge examples used to show where each NHI typically resides
• The article’s own implementation advice on least privilege, RBAC, short-lived tokens, and centralised secrets management
• The real-world examples of exposed AWS keys and overprivileged service accounts that illustrate the failure modes

👉 Unosecur's full post covers the NHI types, placement risks, and real-world examples in more operational detail.

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.