Why existing IAM controls fall short for non-human identities

At a glance

What this is: NHI Mgmt Group's analysis, drawing on Keeper Security's blog post: Human-centric IAM leaves non-human identities exposed to secrets sprawl, standing access and weak ownership.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM and IGA teams need controls that govern machine credentials as first-class identities, not as exceptions to user access models.

Context

Non-human identities are the machine accounts, service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates and workload credentials that systems use to talk to each other. In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, their scale and churn make them easy to overlook, which is exactly why the governance model breaks down before anyone notices abuse.

The security problem is not that NHIs exist, but that most organisations still manage them with tools and processes built for people. That creates blind spots around ownership, rotation, revocation and access scope, so machine identities accumulate persistent privilege long after the business reason for that access has changed.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when non-human identities are governed like human users?

A: Lifecycle triggers, ownership, and review processes stop working because machine identities do not generate joiner, mover, or leaver events. Access can persist after the original purpose disappears, leaving valid credentials outside normal certification paths. That creates a blind spot where privileged access remains active even though nobody can clearly explain why it still exists.

Q: Why do long-lived service account keys create more risk than they solve?

A: Long-lived service account keys create standing access that survives beyond the workload, so one leak can enable repeated use, lateral movement, or delayed abuse. They also make rotation brittle because the organisation must track every copy and dependency. Short-lived, scoped credentials reduce both exposure and operational drag.

Q: How can organisations tell whether NHI governance is actually working?

A: NHI governance is working when every machine identity has an owner, a purpose, a minimum-necessary entitlement, and evidence of rotation and review. If teams can produce that chain without manual reconstruction, the programme is mature enough to withstand audit pressure. If they cannot, the governance model is still fragmented.

Q: What should security teams do when machine credentials are discovered in code or logs?

A: Revoke the exposed credential, trace its downstream privileges, and replace it with a governed identity that has documented ownership and rotation. The goal is to remove both the credential and the unmanaged access path it represents before it becomes persistent.

Technical breakdown

Why human-centric IAM misses machine identity behaviour

Traditional IAM assumes a person has a stable account lifecycle, a clear owner and an authentication flow that can be tied to login events, MFA and periodic review. NHIs do not behave that way. They may be created by pipelines, embedded in applications, reused across services or left running indefinitely without a natural user session. That means onboarding and offboarding logic, recertification cycles and password-oriented controls often fail to capture how the identity is actually used. The result is not just poor visibility, but a mismatch between the control plane and the identity type it is meant to govern.

Practical implication: map each machine identity to a governance model that follows its runtime and lifecycle, not a user-account template.

How secrets sprawl turns access into a control failure

Secrets sprawl appears when credentials are stored in code repositories, config files, CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native services and ad hoc shared vaults without a single governance layer. Once a secret is duplicated across systems, rotation becomes inconsistent and revocation becomes uncertain. That is why hard-coded secrets and shared service accounts are so dangerous: the credential outlives the control that should contain it. In NHI terms, the problem is not only leakage, but persistence. If a credential can be copied widely and retained indefinitely, the blast radius is determined by where it has been embedded, not by who last approved it.

Practical implication: centralise secrets issuance and rotation so one credential state change can actually remove access everywhere it exists.

Why least privilege and JIT need machine-specific enforcement

Least privilege for NHIs is not the same as for users because the identity often executes a single workload, API transaction or service function repeatedly at machine speed. A default grant that seems small at provisioning time can become excessive once a service is reused, redeployed or connected to additional data sources. Just-in-time access helps because it changes standing privilege into task-scoped privilege, but only if the system can bind access to the workload, session and intended action. Without that binding, JIT becomes a label rather than a control, and the NHI still behaves like a permanent bearer of rights.

Practical implication: enforce task-scoped access policies for NHIs and remove any entitlement that is not directly tied to a workload function.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants durable machine-level access that can be reused to move across systems, harvest data or abuse privileged workflows.

1. Entry occurs when hard-coded secrets, shared service accounts or static machine credentials are exposed in repositories, pipelines or mismanaged cloud services.
2. Credential access then follows because the same secret is reused, never rotated or broadly shared, giving an attacker a reliable path into sensitive systems.
3. Escalation happens when the compromised NHI already carries broad permissions or can be reused across multiple environments without traceable ownership.
4. Impact is lateral movement, data breach or privileged system abuse because the credential remains valid long enough to outlast the initial discovery event.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Azure Key Vault Contributor escalation 2024: Datadog found Azure Key Vault Contributor could add itself to access policies and read every secret, key and certificate in a vault.
• BeyondTrust breach 2024: A stolen BeyondTrust Remote Support API key let a China state-sponsored actor reset accounts and reach US Treasury workstations in 2024.

Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 200+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Machine identity governance fails when organisations treat NHIs as implementation details rather than governed identities. The article describes a common pattern: service accounts, workload credentials and API secrets exist everywhere, but ownership, lifecycle and policy enforcement are fragmented across teams. That fragmentation is not an administrative nuisance. It is the control gap that lets machine access persist after the business need has moved on. Practitioners should read this as a governance problem, not a tooling problem.

Secrets sprawl is the named concept that best captures the operational risk in this article. When credentials live in code, pipelines and cloud services at the same time, revocation is no longer a single action but a coordination problem. That means the real security boundary is not the vault alone, but whether every copy of the credential is governed as one identity object. The practitioner implication is straightforward: if you cannot account for all copies, you do not control the secret.

Least privilege for NHIs must be enforced as a lifecycle property, not a provisioning checkbox. The article is right to pair least privilege with rotation, JIT access and continuous discovery because machine identities are often reused, redeployed and expanded over time. The governance issue is privilege drift inside long-lived credentials. Teams that rely on periodic review alone will always lag the runtime reality of machine access.

Hybrid and multi-cloud environments amplify NHI risk because access patterns are distributed faster than ownership can be assigned. The more environments a machine identity touches, the more likely it is that no one team sees the full lifecycle. That is why NHI programmes fail when they are split between DevOps, IT and security without a shared control model. Practitioners need one accountable process for inventory, rotation and offboarding across every environment.

OWASP-NHI and zero standing privilege are the right framing for this problem because the issue is persistent machine authority, not human authentication friction. The article’s risk model aligns with long-lived secrets, overprivileged access and improper offboarding. That combination tells practitioners where to focus: on reducing the duration and scope of machine authority before asking how to review it after the fact.

From our research library:

• NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 1 in every 1,000 non-human identities in enterprise environments is more than 10 years old.
• Read next: Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks

What this signals

Secrets sprawl: the more places a machine credential can live, the harder it becomes to treat revocation as a single control action. For practitioners, that means secret governance has to follow the credential across code, CI/CD, cloud services and shared vaults, not stop at central storage.

Hybrid and multi-cloud estates expose a structural weakness in IAM programmes: ownership of NHIs is often split after deployment, while privilege continues to accumulate. The programme signal to watch is not whether a service account exists, but whether it still has a named owner, a current purpose and a revocation path that actually works.

NHI controls should be evaluated by how quickly they collapse standing access into task-scoped access. If a credential can survive redeployment, be reused by multiple teams and remain valid after the workload changes, the governance model is already behind the runtime reality.

For practitioners

• Centralise machine secret governance Move service accounts, API keys and workload credentials into a single governed secrets workflow so issuance, retrieval, rotation and revocation are visible together.
• Eliminate standing privilege for NHIs Replace permanent machine access with task-scoped entitlements, and remove inherited permissions that are not required for the workload to function.
• Rotate static credentials on a defined schedule Prioritise long-lived passwords, tokens and SSH keys that have no expiry and no automated revocation path, then shorten their lifetime until reuse becomes difficult.
• Assign explicit owners to every machine identity Require a named business or technical owner for each service account and workload credential so offboarding, exception handling and access changes have an accountable decision-maker.
• Continuously discover orphaned NHIs Inventory service accounts, cloud identities and embedded secrets across repositories, pipelines and cloud services, then flag identities that are stale, untracked or unused.

Key takeaways

• Non-human identities become a governance problem when human-centric IAM leaves machine credentials unmanaged, persistent and over-privileged.
• The article points to recurring exposure patterns including hard-coded secrets, shared service accounts, static credentials and default permissions that are never revoked.
• The control response is to pair lifecycle ownership with centralised secrets management, rotation, least privilege and time-limited access.

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.
• Secrets Sprawl: The uncontrolled proliferation of sensitive credentials, API keys, tokens, passwords, certificates, across codebases, cloud environments, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration files. In 2024, over 50 million leaked secrets were found on the dark web.
• Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is access that remains active even when no immediate task requires it. For NHI programmes, it is a common failure mode because long-lived credentials and persistent roles create unnecessary exposure. Reducing standing privilege usually means tighter expiry, on-demand access, and clearer review of who or what still needs access.
• Just-in-Time Access Request: Just-in-Time Access Request is a pattern that grants access only when it is needed and only for the duration required. It reduces standing privilege by making access temporary, policy driven, and task scoped. This approach is especially useful for contractors, sensitive systems, and short-lived operational work.

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.